Avis - Avoid these scammers!

steve811

In August I had a woman open the door of her car into mine in a car park and dent my door. Her partner got aggressive and I had to call the police to get the insurance details. The car went into a body shop for repairs handled by a claims handling company called AI claims, who were excellent.

As part of the service they arranged for a hire car from Avis to be at the bodyshop when I delivered my car. I had to pay a £70 "fuel deposit" which I did in cash to the delivery man. The car was supposed to be delivered with a full tank of fuel and when you return it full, Avis refund the £70. However, the car was not full, and when I pointed this out the delivery driver said "it's just the guage, it is full, they all do that". As I was already late for work I took a photo of the guage and mileage counter on my phone and accpeted the car. The car was dirty, delivered late and misisng an aerial.

At the end of a week my car was ready so I collected it and left the hire car with the body shop. Just before I refuelled the car and put in £25 worth of diesel. As I had only done 134 miles and the cars computer said I had averaged 45mpg I worked out that the car was delivered with about 4.5 litres of fuel below full! That works out as about £6, not a lot for one car but multiply that across the fleet and you have a tidy profit. Again I took a photo to prove it was full. Avis collected it and I waited for my refund. In the meantime I wrote to Avis complaining about the car and the fact that if it had been the other way round Avis would have charged me for the fuel at £2.98 per litre!

A customer service rep from Avis called me on the 2nd September and said that my refund had been processed on the 31st August (the car was returned on the 22nd). She did not see my point with the fuel, and simply said it must have been "delivery mileage" which I had to pay (it only came 15 miles, not enough to use 4.5l) and when I asked when I would get my refund was told "very soon". Since then I have phoned them twice, written to the cliams handling company and even managed to find the name of the UK MD of Avis and email him! I am still waiting for my refund cheque!

Apparently, Avis head office is in Hungary, and the UK office don't issue cheques they simply authorise them then Hungary send them out! I have requested a bank transfer and was told "we only do that if you paid by card". This is after they have finally accepted that their cheque has gone missing, even though I have told them several times I have not received it! They have now said that they will send another cheque, but it takes "five days to process", so no idea how long that will take!

The MD of Avis is Kevin Bradshaw (K[EMAIL="Kevin.Bradshaw@avis.co.uk"]evin.Bradshaw@avis.co.uk[/EMAIL]) Yesterday I had an email from him saying that he had asked the head of customer services to contact me within 5 days. WHy he could not simply instruct them to pay me by bank transfer is beyond me and I think this is yet another example of one of the big companies who don't give a damn about the customer. What is annoying is that the bodyshop could have supplied a courtesy car, if I had been prepared to wait a day or two, but I could not be without a car for work.

Visiondvd

A lot of work and headaches you gave yourself for £6.
If you had put the same effort into an hours overtime at work you would have been better off and smiling.
Just forget about dealing with Avis and post bad feedback about them everywhere.

steve811

Firstly I don't get overtime! I work for the government and we count ourselves lucky to be in work, let alone get anything extra. Secondly my point about the £6 was that if the boot was on the other foot Avis would have charged me £12.51 for the 4.5l of fuel! My main point in writing to them was that when we have had hire cars in work other companies have tried the same scam "you did not return it full so we are charging you £3 a litre", when it was full but we can't prove it.

moonrakerz

steve811 wrote: »

Firstly I don't get overtime! I work for the government and we count ourselves lucky to be in work,

.....can't be too onerous a job though as you give your "government" e-mail address on this site in response to an MSE query - VERY unprofessional for someone that I and every other user of this site is paying for !!!

steve811

And what exactly does that have to do with anything? Our department allows us to use our computers for personal email and web use "within reason". You have no idea of the hours I work, the time I spend on the computer using it for work purposes or how much I do out of hours, so you are just taking a cheap pot shot. Oh, and if you think my time is spent unproductively, why not complain to my boss, I'll supply the email if you like.

paddedjohn

Visiondvd wrote: »

A lot of work and headaches you gave yourself for £6.
If you had put the same effort into an hours overtime at work you would have been better off and smiling.
Just forget about dealing with Avis and post bad feedback about them everywhere.

If you re-read the post you will see that the op is trying to get back the £70 deposit they paid for the fuel, not just £6;)

moonrakerz

steve811 wrote: »

And what exactly does that have to do with anything? Our department allows us to use our computers for personal email and web use "within reason".

Sorry - just don't believe that ! Government IT equipment is not supplied for personal use.
If you spent less time looking/conversing on MSE during working hours you could probably get your job done in its allotted time.................

KME91

moonrakerz wrote: »

Sorry - just don't believe that ! Government IT equipment is not supplied for personal use.
If you spent less time looking/conversing on MSE during working hours you could probably get your job done in its allotted time.................

Actually I work for the government too and our IT policy allows the same thing - email may be used for personal reasons within reason, and as long as it does not breach other elements of the IT policies.

Hermione_Granger

Last year I was employed by a Government department (self employeed on a contract basis), reorganising part of their stores procedures, and this involved a lot of IT related work. Because of this I was issued with a laptop for internet access and when given this I was required to sign a disclaimer stating that I could use this for personal use but I would be required to abide by strict guidelines.

These restrictions basically stated that I couldn't access any porographic sites, I couldn't use it for personal trade or business or for anything that involved copyright violation and that upon request I must allow access to the computer by the head of IT if they wished to check the usage I had put it to.
These are fairly standard terms for most government issued PCs or laptops.