Avis Says Customer Drove 95,000 Miles In A Week — Then Charged $6,288 On An Unlimited-Mileage Rental

An Avis customer booked a week-long full-size rental at the Dubuque, Iowa airport for $199.64, including unlimited mileage, but was charged $6,288.22 because the rental company claiming he drove a white Toyota Camry Hybrid enough to circle the earth four times. He’d have had to average 587 miles per hour, 24 hours a day. That makes no sense. Plus, his rate and receipt even show “UNLIMITED” miles. When he picked up the vehicle, he says the woman at the counter told him she didn’t actually work for Avis. The manager had asked her to fill in, and she cl was helping for free. Maybe controls and fleet tracking at that location aren’t especially strong? The Invoice Is Insane According to the final invoice: Odometer out: 26 Odometer in: 95,199 Total driven: 29,637 miles Miles billed: 19,638 Mileage rate: 25 cents Mileage charge: $4,909.50 The reservation also says “Mileage: Unlimited.” View post on imgur.com View post on imgur.com Where do we even begin? 95,199 minus 26 is not 29,637. Covering that distance during the 162-hour rental would require an average speed of 587.5 miles per hour without stopping for fuel, food or sleep. Driving 29,637 miles would still require averaging 182.9 miles per hour. Even the 19,638 miles Avis actually billed would mean averaging 121.2 miles per hour for the entire rental. 29,637 “total driven” – 19,638 miles billed = 9,999 miles So maybe Avis’s system is using that as generic stand-in for unlimited mileage, but another part of its billing system treated it as a literal allowance and charged everything above 9,999? What’s crazy of course is that feels are being piled onto the false mileage charges. Incorrect charge for mileage: $4,909.50 Additional concession recovery fee: $490.95 Additional Iowa and other taxes: $648.06 Total overcharge: $6,048.51 But The Rate Included Unlimited Miles! Avis can’t even charge this customer for “excess miles” if they’d driven 100,000 miles because an unlimited mileage rate has no excess miles point. Avis advertises unlimited mileage for weekly and cross-country rentals, even. Its rental terms say customers pay mileage charges only “if applicable, at the rate stated in the Agreement.” Here both the reservation and even the final rate calculation state ‘unlimited’. Whether unlimited really means unlimited was tested in a similarly absurd Hertz incident. A customer actually drove 25,000 miles during a month-long rental with unlimited mileage. A local Hertz manager demanded $10,000 and threatened to call the police when the customer objected. Hertz corporate eventually apologized and said, “Per the terms of the contract, the customer will not be billed for mileage.” There is one wrinkle. The customer says he used a very favorable corporate discount code and was not asked for proof of eligibility. Avis’s terms allow it to void a corporate rate when a renter is not eligible. That would permit Avis reprice the rental at a standard rate, not choose a mileage-limited rate (and that’s not what is happening here in any case). Hertz Used To Arrest Customers, But Avis Is Famous For Doing ‘This’ Hertz may be known for having customers arrested, because they used to keep such poor tabs on their fleet that they’d get a car returned, lose track of it and report it stolen, and then the next customer who rented it would get pulled over. But they seem to have solved that problem (when they brought on Palantir to help track their fleet). Mileage issues seem to be Avis’s special gift to renters. In 2022 an Avis customer reported that the company listed his starting mileage as 5 instead of approximately 19,500, producing a receipt showing 19,576 miles driven in 36 hours. Another Avis customer’s rental was improperly checked in and out and they billed roughly $8,500 based on all 31,689 miles already on one vehicle (they eventually refunded about $8,100). A customer in Toronto drove about 300 kilometers during a three-day rental. Avis charged her more than C$8,000 for driving 36,482 kilometers. After media attention, it blamed an odometer-reading error, apologized and refunded the money. An Avis customer renting one way between Rochester and Buffalo was billed $7,053.79 for supposedly driving 13,351 miles in 13 hours. They disputed the charge with American Express, but it reportedly took Avis nearly seven months to fix the issue and threatened to ban him over a remaining balance of approximately $4. Last year, an Avis customer at LAX was charged more than $16,000 for allegedly driving 30,500 miles in five days. After repeated calls, Avis said the return employee had entered approximately 50,000 miles instead of 20,000 and finally issued a corrected receipt. How To Deal With This Problem Dispute the error with Avis. File a chargeback with your credit card for being charged an incorrect amount and services not billed as agreed (not as an unauthorized merchant transaction). Then demand that Avis produce: The prior and next rental records for the vehicle Pickup and return odometer photographs Any ‘connected car’ odometer and location data Agent entry logs You also ultimately need a corrected final receipt showing no balance. A credit card chargeback can return the money to you while Avis’s system shows an unpaid balance, which would cause them to send you to collections, ban you, or both. Here, the customer can also file an Iowa Attorney General consumer complaint, and if none of that works go to small claims court. (Avis’s contract requires 30 days written notice before bringing a claim, but exempts small claims cases from mandatory arbitration.) Topics on this page