I used to work for a car rental company. Actually, it was an insurance company that rented car. Cause 80% of their profits were on the insurance. The car rental part was just to bring more people to insurance part.
Car rental companies seem to deploy exactly the kind of tactics that motivates my skepticism of insurance companies in general.
Car rental companies are notorious for deploying high pressure sales tactics to bully customers into paying for damage waiver or insurance upgrades. I’ve heard of companies basing bonuses for employees on these conversions and I’ve also heard of companies that just have a hard and fast quota with policies like “you need to get this many upsells per unit time or you are automatically fired”.
The fee structure and legalese for rental cars is often customer hostile for the purpose of scaring people into paying for upgrades they don’t need — and in many cases very large categories of risk are excluded from coverage via tricky language ...
I rented from a company called goldcar in Spain recently. Their rental prices are insanely low (paid 30 euro for a car for 3 weeks). They seem to make money entirely on the extras and the float of your excess deposit. They charge you your excess in full when you pick up the car (1200 euro for the car I had) then refund you when you return minus any damages. I’ve rented from them a few times and they do some shadey things which I’ve learned to be careful about.
- They have a range of constantly changing and sometimes screwy refueling policies: buy the tank in advance return empty, “flex fuel” where you pay a (non-refundable!) fee to pay a deposit on the tank and then get refunded your deposit based on how much fuel is in the tank when you return it, and (only sometimes and seemingly at a different rental rate) buy full return full.
- Once they charged my card in dollars rather than euros (without asking) resulting in a huge 5% currency conversion fee by their payment processor - I can’t imagine that fee doesn’t make it back to them in some amount ... (that really pissed me off and I probably wouldn’t ever have rented from them again but I actually didn’t notice this until much later)
I think they’ve gotten dinged in the past for some illegal/deceptive practices. I personally have mostly come our ahead using them — but only by being careful and knowing exactly what to say/do on each rental experience ... I think from recent rental experiences it has gotten less scammy for me.
The mentality necessary to navigate rental car insurance decision making seems the same mindset required to engage in business with other insurance entities - most insurance markets generally seem ripe to me for similar adversarial game playing ...
breatheoften|7 years ago
Car rental companies are notorious for deploying high pressure sales tactics to bully customers into paying for damage waiver or insurance upgrades. I’ve heard of companies basing bonuses for employees on these conversions and I’ve also heard of companies that just have a hard and fast quota with policies like “you need to get this many upsells per unit time or you are automatically fired”.
The fee structure and legalese for rental cars is often customer hostile for the purpose of scaring people into paying for upgrades they don’t need — and in many cases very large categories of risk are excluded from coverage via tricky language ...
I rented from a company called goldcar in Spain recently. Their rental prices are insanely low (paid 30 euro for a car for 3 weeks). They seem to make money entirely on the extras and the float of your excess deposit. They charge you your excess in full when you pick up the car (1200 euro for the car I had) then refund you when you return minus any damages. I’ve rented from them a few times and they do some shadey things which I’ve learned to be careful about.
- They have a range of constantly changing and sometimes screwy refueling policies: buy the tank in advance return empty, “flex fuel” where you pay a (non-refundable!) fee to pay a deposit on the tank and then get refunded your deposit based on how much fuel is in the tank when you return it, and (only sometimes and seemingly at a different rental rate) buy full return full. - Once they charged my card in dollars rather than euros (without asking) resulting in a huge 5% currency conversion fee by their payment processor - I can’t imagine that fee doesn’t make it back to them in some amount ... (that really pissed me off and I probably wouldn’t ever have rented from them again but I actually didn’t notice this until much later)
I think they’ve gotten dinged in the past for some illegal/deceptive practices. I personally have mostly come our ahead using them — but only by being careful and knowing exactly what to say/do on each rental experience ... I think from recent rental experiences it has gotten less scammy for me.
The mentality necessary to navigate rental car insurance decision making seems the same mindset required to engage in business with other insurance entities - most insurance markets generally seem ripe to me for similar adversarial game playing ...