Complaint Review: Enterprise Rent-A-Car

Ok, if you are on this site you suspect that all rental car companies are shady.  I agree completely, but I wanted to talk about my experience with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and how their business model appears to expose the customer to more rip-offs than their peers.

My wife and I just a had our first daughter, and we scheduled a beach vacation when she was about 5 months old.  If you have kids, you know that for a week away you need to bring a lot of gear.  So we rented a Yukon to carry all the stuff.  We got a little discount through Costco with the Enterprise Rent-A-Car down the street.  BIG MISTAKE!  It started when we went to pick up the car.  I travel a lot for work, and know to make sure that every little ding and chip is marked on the agreement before I leave the lot.  As we were doing the walk-around, I pointed out some chips on the front bumper. 

The associate said that they did not worry about things that small.  I expressed my desire to have them marked, but it was obvious that he was not going to write them down.  This upset me, but by going with Enterprise I had allowed myself to be taken advantage of.  I was there with my wife and small daughter, and we were leaving the next morning.  I couldn’t take the time to make an issue of it, and couldn’t go elsewhere.  I try to think the best of people, and I don’t want to think that this person was thinking “I know this family wants to get back home with their infant daughter, but they don’t have anywhere else to go, so I’m going to set them up.” 

Even if this wasn’t malicious, I was in a tough spot because I didn’t have an alternative to Enterprise Rent-A-Car between that evening and the next morning.  If I had planned the rental from the airport (less convenient, but doable), I don’t think this would have been a problem.  If an airport rental car company gets difficult, their competition is literally next door, so they don’t usually get difficult, because I will walk away.  In fact, I’ve never had an issue with marking damage at airport rental car companies.  Unfortunately, we signed the agreement at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and hoped for the best.

We had a great trip, and returned the car Sunday since I had to work Monday morning.  I left the car in the parking spot just outside the office and placed the keys in the drop box.  The next day my wife gets a call that there is damage to the car, and when I get back from work I drive over there to look at the “damage”.  On the driver’s side rear bumper there was a small deformation in the plastic.  I know that I didn’t cause the ding.  The vehicle came with backup assistance, and we drove it on highways to and from the beach, where it sat in the breezeway for 6 days.  To be honest, it was so minor, I can’t tell you if it was there before, or it happened on Sunday after we dropped it off. 

The manager of the office was quick to tell me that this was in fact a “reportable” damage, and even if it happened after I dropped it off, it was still my problem.  I understand the idea of me being responsible for “after-hours” drop-off, but what has me irritated is the big difference in the inspection before and after.  The associate doing the pick-up inspection made a big deal about not worrying about “small” things, and the drop off inspection made a big deal about minor stuff.  I left very unhappy, but knew that I put myself in this position by going with Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  It wasn’t until we got the invoice that I felt that Enterprise Rent-A-Car was trying to rip me off.

A little over a month later we get the invoice from Enterprise that lists a loss of over $700.  The invoice is: Damages $443; Loss of Use $224 (2.5 days @ $89.99/day); Administrative Fees $50; and Diminishment of Value $44.30 (waived from the amount due).  They also attached photos of the vehicle, and the invoice from the repair facility. 

The first thing that caught my attention is that the close up photo of the damage didn’t look like what I remembered.  I brought up the picture I took in my phone, and sure enough, it was in the same location, but did not look the same.  Then I noticed on the repair facility invoice that the vehicle color and license plate did not match.  I rented a beige vehicle with Virginia tags, and the repair facility repaired a grey vehicle with Florida tags. 

I looked at the pictures again, and there were some pictures that showed the vehicle I rented with Virginia tags, and a picture with the “damage,” but no picture showed both the “damage” and the license plate.  So now I wonder if I am paying for damage by someone else.  Again, I like to think that most people and organizations are not malicious, but I can’t think of an innocent explanation where the vehicle on an Enterprise Rent-A-Car damage claim invoice is different (different color and license plates) from the invoice backup from the repair facility.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.

My understanding is that Enterprise’s policy is that the Loss-of-Use claim is based on the number of hours that the vehicle is actually being worked on.  This is good, since I drive by the location regularly, and the vehicle hadn’t moved for several days after they told me it was damaged.  The repair invoice clearly lists 10 hours total of labor.  That should be 1.25 days, or half of what they invoiced me for.

Finally, I just can’t understand the Administrative Fees and Diminishment-of-Value.  The $50 for running the business just seems like Enterprise Rent-A-Car told me: “now that we’ve stuck you with a damage claim, we’re just going to pile on.”  The value loss is equally puzzling.  If they have repaired the vehicle (to the tune of $443), why has it lost value?  Then the idea of waiving it seems like a threat, as though they are saying, “we could rip you off even more, so you should be happy with paying the $717.”

Overall, I’ve had a very unpleasant experience with Enterprise Rent-A-Car.  The fact that they operate in areas without competition seems to make it easy to jam customers.  Additionally, the two times I met with actual employees they seemed to support this model.

I’ve raised the concerns about the damage irregularities to the Damage Recovery Unit, and hope they can offer an innocent explanation.  (Not that incompetence is good, but it would be better than actively being scammed.)  I will follow-up to this for all you reader’s out there, to let you know what I find out.  In the interim I would recommend that if you have to rent from Enterprise, do so with caution.