Page 11 - IAV Digital Magazine #570

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Avis Charged A Customer $6,000 After Claiming She Drove A Rental Car 23,000 miles In 3 Days
By Ryan Hogg
Avis charged a cus- tomer more than $6,000 after claiming she drove a rental car nearly 23,000 miles in three days, according to reports.
North Shore
News first
reported that Giovanna Boniface rented a GMC Yukon
Denali from Toronto Pearson Airport to help her daughter move to college.
Boniface told NSN she drove between the airport, downtown Toronto, and to Kitchener, Ontario, where she visited her mother-in-law. She estimated that in total she drove 300 kilo- metres (186 miles).
While she was wait- ing to take a flight to Paris, France, Boniface, who had prepaid $1,000 to rent the car, checked her credit card statement to check it had gone through correctly, per CTV News.
"That's when I notice this charge for over C$8,000 ($6,137)
from Avis," she told CTV, after tweeting a picture of her receipt.
Boniface told CTV that Avis had charged her for driving 36,482 kilometres (22,668 miles) at a rate of 25 cents per kilometers. She estimated that she would have had to have driven at 310 miles an hour for 72 hours straight to hit that distance.
"I could have driven to and from South Africa and still had several thousand kilo- metres to spare," she told The Daily Hive. "Of course it's ridicu- lous. I don't even put that many kilometres on my car in a year, let alone in three days."
Boniface told CTV she spent several hours on the phone with Avis representa- tives, and that some- one only got in touch after the media began reporting her story.
An Avis spokesperson told CTV and The Daily Hive that it had apologized to
Boniface and issued a refund.
Avis, along with rival car rental companies, have made similar errors in the past.
In April, Elliot Advocacy
reported how a cus- tomer was charged more than $4,000 after Avis claimed she had kept her car for 34 days after drop- ping it off and then flying to another country.
Last November The Guardian
reported how a Hertz customer visiting his dying brother was charged double for dropping off his car two days early.
An Avis spokesperson said: "Avis has apolo- gized to Ms. Boniface for the error in odometer reading and issued a refund. This should never have happened and we have taken preventa- tive steps to avoid this from occurring in the future."
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine