Budget Car Rental trying to rip me off for re-fuelling charge. Any ideas?

nickwolvercote

Hi everyone,

I wonder whether somebody could help me with what I expect is a very common problem.

We recently hired a car in Majorca for a week from Budget Car Rental.

We booked online before we left the UK, paying £117.78 by debit card. When we arrived at Palma, we were strongly advised to take out their Collision Damage Waiver for £105.58, which we did.

The car was supplied with a full tank of fuel, and we were told to return it full to avoid a penalty charge. In the week, we covered 473km, using about 1/3 tank of diesel. Not wanting to pay their re-fuelling charge, we filled the car up just outside the airport immediately before we returned it, which cost some €35 and was paid in cash.

Soon after arriving back in the UK, Budget took a further £105.58 from our account without any explanation. When I e-mailed them, they merely say its a "Cargo Gasolina" i.e. fuel charge, and that we left the tank empty - which is simply incorrect!

They say that if we can't produce a receipt for the fuel (which we can't - we weren't given one), they don't want to know.

Has anyone got any ideas on what we could try next, as this has cast rather a pall over what was a very nice holiday.

Thanks,

Nick.

greyteam1959

Contact your bank & tell them that the £105.58 taken from your debit card was an un authorised transaction ???
And next time take a pic of the fuel gauge with the car ignition on.

d61mts

Its a difficult one, unless its a fluke it seems strange that the refuelling fee happens to be exactly the same as the CDW. When contacting them are they sure they haven't double charged you for this instead? Otherwise its a very expensive tank of fuel. Without a reciept its difficult to prove one way or the other whether the car was full or not, and personally I'm unsure what to advise.

nickwolvercote

Thanks for the suggestions.

Contacting the bank is something I hadn’t thought of, but I wonder how far I’d actually get. Got to be worth a go though.

Yes, of course, next time I’ll take a pic of the fuel gauge. It’s particularly frustrating as I took loads of pics of the car when we were given it, recording all its tiny blemishes, just in case they tried to charge us for those.

I noticed that the CDW and refuelling charges were identical to the cent too! I was confident they’d just charged us the CDW twice because they made us sign TWO rental contracts, because the first car they gave us was an automatic when we wanted (and had requested) a manual. But as soon as I suggested this, they sent us a breakdown of the charges which, conveniently, labelled the other £105.58 as the refuelling charge.

The chap (whose English was excellent) at the counter in Palma was quite explicit in telling us that our duty was to return the car with a full tank to avoid any further charges. There’s also a diagram of a fuel gauge showing “full” on the Contract with “Fuel at Start” printed alongside it.

However, I’ve just read the small print on the contract we were forced to sign at Palma airport (with a long queue of people behind us with our two tiny kids crying because they’d missed their kip) and it clearly says “the Prepaid fill-up option is obligatory in order to defray the expenses of refilling the tank incurred by the rental company, which are not refundable irrespective of the level of the tank at the end of the rental”. To me, this means that we were always going to pay for a full tank of fuel, whether or not we used it, and there was absolutely no need to re-fill the tank before returning the car either.

Am I being dim here and misunderstanding the contract? Or have they changed their policy and not updated the contract wording? Or have I simply been fleeced?

Thanks,

Nick

headpin

What car were you driving? Check the tank capacity - look up on-line. You should then be able to calculate how much it would cost to fill if completely empty. do not forget to add a service charge for Budget to Fill. You should also be able to find out the mileage when out and return from you rental agreement and return receipt or ask Budget for the readings. That will the indicate what is needed to need to fill the tank based upon an average mpg.

With all of the above you will have some basis to challenge. £105 seems a lot of fuel for any normal car, were you driving a truck? Price of derv in Majorca is about €1.45/litre. So £105 is around 72 litres or about 16 gallons. If you allow say 20% for service fee then that is around 12 gallons. Does that look reasonable for the vehicle you were driving? But then look at the mileage on the rental agreement out and in. Ask Budget for a redacted copy of the next hirers agreement to get their out miles if not on your return receipt.

Do not let it drop.

nickwolvercote

Thanks!

Car was a 5-door Golf, quoted as a 1.6 TDI 105CV DSG [5-speed, diesel] on the documentation, whose specs online include a "range" of 1447 km, so that's how far a tank should take you under ideal conditions. We apparently did 473 km according to their paperwork (which sounds plausable), which equates to almost exactly 1/3 of a tank.

Fuel tank capacity is quoted as 55L, so at your figure of €1.45/litre, it would cost €79.75 to fill the tank from empty, or €26.58 to re-fill the tank after the 473km we'd done. I suppose this correlates reasonably well with the €35 we spent filling it up ourselves, allowing for all those steep hills we drove in the North. Add 20% service charge and that's still only €32 - €42.

headpin wrote: »

Do not let it drop.

I don't intend to, and have made it my life's mission to give these people as much bad publicity as I possibly can. We're law-abiding people trying to make our money go as far as we can, and this really leaves a bad taste.

What do you think of my interpretation of the small print I mentioned in post 4? I can't help feeling they intended to charge us for a full tank (+ their service charge) even if we'd done no mileage, as it appears to say in the contract (in spite of being told something quite different by their man in Palma). The contract also says "Fuel Price per litre = €1.71 excl. tax, service excluded", so a full (55 litre) tank would set you back €114 incl. VAT at 21%, excluding the service charge.

Nick.

digitaltoast

nickwolvercote wrote: »

We recently hired a car in Majorca for a week from Budget Car Rental.

The car was supplied with a full tank of fuel, and we were told to return it full to avoid a penalty charge.

I think you've fallen foul of a fairly nasty trick, sounds like you might possibly have been scammed if the agent told you to return it full.

Have a close look at your booking receipt, terms etc. I've just gone to Budget and selected a car for a week, and saw the following:



Now here's the key thing; if you can somehow prove she said to return it full, then that's your way out. But I think they have you by the short and curlies here. This is why I made the "checkin" guy wait while I filmed the dashboard and entire outside of car, and also made him write "100% full tank" on the checkin receipt.

This is a MASSIVE moneyspinner for them.

I'll admit, I didn't know about this until I read a thread on Tripadvisor, which led to me doing a neat little "3+3 day" trick (explained in https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4532533 along with more details of this scam).

Complain, complain and complain again. The first UK agency I tried wouldn't let me do the "3+3 day" trick, then sent me an "abandonment survey". When I filled it in and replied that I didn't want to be ripped for fuel, fair play to them they actually read the survey and replied "but everyone does it in Majorca". To which I replied "well everyone needs to stop, and UK agencies like yourself need to refuse to deal with them until they do". No reply!

nickwolvercote

Thanks to you too.

I've read the small print in the 7-page e-mail they sent us just after we booked, and it does indeed say:

Additional Costs - paid at the Rental Station 79.86 EUR
Prepaid Fuel

and later...

Fuel Policy for Spain.
When you pick up your rental car it comes with a full tank.
If you keep the car for 3 days or less please bring it back full. If we need to refuel the car we’ll charge you for the fuel plus 19.82 Euros (including taxes) to cover our costs.
If you keep the car for 4 days or more just bring it back to us empty. We charge you 79.86 Euros (including taxes) for the fuel – and there are no refunds, so make sure you use it all up.

So it seems that the guy at their desk in Palma was mistaken or deliberately lied to us. It's particularly frustrating because I even queried what he'd said and he re-iterated it.

But that still doesn't explain why have we been charged £105.58 instead of the €79.86 mentioned above.

It also doesn't explain why the amount we were charged is, by some huge coincidence, exactly the same as the CDW charge.

E-mailing them is useless as they don't seem to read what we write, and the replies are often nonsensical to me e.g:

"I have checked your rental details and found that the rented vehicle was not returned with an empty tank therefore the relevant charge has been added to your invoice. We are not in the position of making a refund in this case "

There are also other bizarre anomolies in their paperwork, e.g. they've got the named driver's DoB wrong (day, month and year!) and it talks about the car being hired from "Palma Apt, Bosnia-Herzegovina" (yes, really).

Many thanks,

Nick.

nickwolvercote

Well, after many, many hours of messing around, I sat down and wrote a civil but firm 2-page letter to the MD, a Ms Kaye Ceille at Avis Budget UK in Bracknell, posting it by recorded delivery yesterday afternoon.

And this morning, we got call from one of her staff, apologising and promising to refund the £105.58 to my card straight away!

A nice result, but a huge waste of time, for which no compensation or gesture of goodwill payment was offered. And no, I won't be using Budget again, thank you.

Thanks everyone,

Nick.

Bob_the_Saver

mervyn11 wrote: »

And next time take a pic of the fuel gauge with the car ignition on.

Showing the return mileage

nickwolvercote

Yes, good point.

But I still don't think it would have helped here. The contract said one thing, the guy at the desk something completely different, and the customer service department didn't read our e-mails properly before dashing-off a reply.