I rented a white 2014 Kia Optima from the Feasterville, PA Enterprise Rent-A-Car branch between 10/13/2014 and 10/24/2014 as my vehicle was having work done at my body shop. Upon returning the vehicle, a small scratch on the bottom of the front bumper was noticed with smudges of white material covering it. The damage to the bumper itself was small enough that it passed Enterprises's "half dollar" criteria for no repair necessary, however I was told that the white material smudged on the bumper caused the damage to be classified as a home repair which results in a mandatory body shop repair on Enterprise's end. This is the first instance where it became immediately clear how little the employees and company as a whole care about customers. The staff accused me of allegedly using 'white-out' to try to cover damage to the bumper that I purposefully caused. When I explained that this damge came from a pothole near my driveway, and the white material in question was road paint that scraped on to the bumper I was ignored and treated VERY rudely. The fact that one would even think to accuse a customer of haphazardly smudging white-out, an ink-erasing stationery material, on a car is absurd. I was told that the damage would most likely be under $100 and that the branch location would be able to split the cost of the repair with me. I informed the agent and his manager that under no circumstances should he charge my credit card on file before providing me with a body shop estimate. This estimate, which I requested twice more on separate occasions via telephone, was not provided until long after my card was charged for $466! I have pictures of the damage in question that illustrate that this price is extremely inflated. On top of all of this, I did not want my card charged as I am a VISA cardholder, and VISA would have covered the entirety of my costs had I been able to contact in time.
After being forced into paying these charges, I received a second message from Enterprise stating that I owed an additional $124.10 due to loss-of-use charges and "administrative fees". Once again, had I been afforded the opportunity to contact VISA these charges also would have been taken care of, but the utterly unprofessional employees obviously could not care less about customer satisfaction or general business courtesy. My attorney has instructed me to not pay any of these charges before obtaining a fleet log book for the time in question (October 2014) and a damage and work history of previous rentals for this vehicle. The above text was a paraphrased message that I had sent to Enterprise in January 2015. Still, their customer care team did little to remedy the situation so I filed a dispute with VISA over the false charges. I was refunded the $466 mentioned above and stopped hearing from the damage recovery unit... all was well. Fastforward to March, and now I am being threatened with collections if I don't pay the $124 administrative fees in addition to the $466 repair fee that has already been deemed invalid. I can't get in touch with the area manager, and the corporate customer care deflects email messages with generic responses.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
St. Louis,#2UPDATE Employee
Tue, March 24, 2015
Thank you for bringing this to our attention Anthony. Please send us a detailed email to [email protected] with complete details including: Renter’s full name, current phone number, location rented, rental agreement (RA) number, “DX” or claim number and reference # 150324-002126. As customer service is of the utmost importance, we would like to look further into this situation for you. Thanks for posting and we look forward to hearing from you soon. -Tatiana