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John Cletheroe's
USA and Canada Holiday Hints |
Car rental is one of the few areas in the USA where you could encounter relatively unfriendly service and get the impression of being railroaded into extra expenditure, if not being outright swindled. Since it follows on shortly after the often intimidating immigration process you may gain a less than perfect first impression of America. It gets better.
Some of this poor impression of car rental companies is due to the complexity of the various different cost elements. Certainly visitors from Britain with a voucher which only covers the basic rental cost have no justification for claiming to have been swindled when they are expected to pay for CDW/LDW and charged sales tax in the USA or Canada.
On the other hand, car rental companies enhance their profits, and their sales clerks their commission, by selling upgrades and extra insurance policies that you don't really want or need. Some of the well known car rental companies have business travellers on expense accounts who couldn't care less how much the rental costs as the majority of their customers, and their sales clerks have difficulty understanding that someone who is paying for the rental out of their own pocket wishes to be more careful. I wonder if the car rental companies realise just how many of their customers who are paying for car rental themselves despise and hate their hard sell tactics - a car rental company which made a big advertising point of not employing hard sell tactics could be extremely popular.
Hopefully the other pages in this section will help you to conduct your negotiation with the car rental company sales clerk from a position of knowledge. The best advice is to be firm but polite when rejecting upgrades and unnecessary insurance options - but this can be very difficult when encountering a hard sell sales clerk after a long flight.
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EMail me Please note that I am not in the car rental business or the travel trade and I cannot provide any more information on car rental other than that presented here. Nor can I process any requests for quotations or reservations for car rental - these should be directed to car rental companies or travel agents.
Most recently modified 25-Mar-01