Be diligent with documentation to avoid rental car charges for damage that’s not your fault.
A few years back, I rented a car for a couple of days during a visit to Denver, and the whole trip went smoothly. So imagine my surprise when I walked out to the hotel parking lot on my last morning and saw that the back of one side-view mirror was missing, exposing cracked black plastic underneath. I almost immediately panicked—I hadn’t purchased rental insurance and had no car insurance of my own at the time, so I knew I’d be responsible for the damage.
Because I hadn’t hit anything while driving, I assumed this must have been the result of a parking lot hit-and-run. Thus began a whirlwind morning as I requested security camera footage from the hotel and filed an incident report online, checking my watch every few minutes to be sure I wouldn’t miss my impending flight. When I brought the car back to the rental company on the way to the airport, the drop-off attendant noted the exposed mirror, so I signed a damage report without a thought and jotted down that I was looking for footage from the hotel to find the person responsible.
But as I was boarding the plane, I got a call from the hotel security guard, who told me that the footage clearly showed the damage had been there since I first pulled the car into the lot. When I finally looked at the photos I’d taken of my rental, I realized that I’d been mistaken—the damage had been there all along, I just hadn’t noticed it until my last day.
There was just one problem: when I’d picked up the car, I’d forgotten to take the pre-rental photos in the lot, instead snapping them after 30 minutes of driving when I’d pulled over. This, plus my signature on the damage claim, meant the rental company still sent me a $326 bill for the repairs.
After many weeks of phone calls and emails, in which I explained the situation and insisted that the company check the records of the car’s rentals before mine, they finally dropped the claim and closed the case. I’ve since rented from the same company many times, but with a few key differences in my approach. Here is what I learned.
