Dear Sir / Madam,

You have not answered the query at all. I want to know how you can send me a quote of roughly $450 and then on arrival the bill gets jacked to over $1200 ! As I explained in my previous email there is no part of your quote to me that mentioned this massive amount of money. In future I shall never be using your very poor services again. I will keep you posted of my mailshots addressed to all travel companies, Facebook, Twitter, review sites, forums and office of fair trade here in the UK.

When questioned, your employee at the pick up desk read the complaint script that she admitted she has to use many times a day as I am most obviously not an isolated case. In all other parts of the world that I have been too, a hire car would not be let out the car park without being fully insured, you are not operating any where near a professional service by using "ratcheting strategy" on your pricing and miss-quotes.

I have seen many forums that are littered with similar stories (just by typing "thrifty car complaints") into Google and I will be doing my upmost to bring all of these to a much wider audience. Having rented in Orlando on several occasions, I can say with confidence that you are well below par with your competitors, and really know how to put a sour taste in everyones holiday.

Also please remove me from your mailing list, it is an insult.

regretfully yours,

Mr Legge.

My family visited Atlanta on Oct. 10, 2010. Before the trip, I reserved my hotel and rental car through Sam club travel, and prepaid the cost, $184.01 (Itin# 11347286634), for one night hotel and rental car. I picked up the car ~1:00 pm on Oct. 9 and returned the car ~4:00 pm on Oct 10. When reviewing my credit card activities, I noticed Thrifty charged my rental car again. When I called customer service of Thrifty, I was told that the reason I was charged twice is that, in prepaid package, there is no loss & damage coverage, which was declined when I picked up the car, because I can transfer this coverage from my personal car to rental car. When I declined the loss & damage coverage in the counter, the representative of Thrifty did not say anything about the double charge. I would expect Thrifty refund my money immediately. Instead, the customer service representative created a case for me and said someone would contact me in 7 days. The whole process may take forever.

After booking the package, I searched internet about Thrifty rental Car Company and found so many complaints about Thrifty. Now I understand why. I will never ever rent a car from Thrifty.

I made five phone calls to the Thrifty international phone line reservation from home in the US beforehand to make a rental car reservation and when I made my reservation I stated that my credit
card would serve for insurance and I would decline the rental insurance, and none of the agents
mentioned any problem with this. In addition I arranged to get a 10% discount using my American Express card.
Arriving at the Thrifty counter in Munich airport Terminal 2, I was told that because the Munich airport location had had numerous problems with credit card companies refusing to pay insurance
claims, that the Munich airport location's policy was to require written proof from the credit card company that that rental car would be covered. In addition I was told that under no circumstances
could American Express be used for this, only MasterCard or Visa. As the Munich airport has no free Internet, I had to sign up for a one-hour paid service for $11.15 (€8) and downloaded both the
MasterCard and Visa documents online, to show that both of my credit cards covered rental cars.

When I showed this to agent, she said I had misunderstood, and that I would require written proof SPECIFICALLY for THIS rental reservation. As an alternative, the Thrifty insurance was €250,
doubling the price of my rental. When I asked for a cheaper rate, I was told I could pay €150, but I would be charged a €1200 deductible against my credit card in case of an accident.

At this point I gave up and went to one of the other rental car companies in the terminal and quickly obtained a rental car for with none of the runaround about insurance.

If the Thrifty international reservation line had let me know during my 5 calls before the reservation while in the US that I would have to have written proof specifically covering this reservation, I have
no doubt that I could have obtained this ahead of time.

Also, if Thrifty has a special arrangement favoring American Express cards, why did the Munich site say that even with written proof of a specific coverage that American Express cards could not be used
for insurance?

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am Jason Muscat from Malta and I am writing this letter of complaint with regards to my car rental from your company.

On the 20 th of August 2010, I hired a Volkswagen Touran from your company for 4 days, where I have paid extra charges to remove the excess of GBP500 in case of damage.

Please note that on the third day of my rental period around 05:00pm, while driving back to the guest house we were staying in Windermere, the car suddenly stopped from working properly. I noticed that I couldn’t insert the gears. At the same time smoke was coming out of the bonnet. After several attempts, to insert the gears the clucth collapsed under my feet, as a result the car couldn’t move. I managed to put the car aside and started thinking of what to do. The location was a remote area in the mountains at the Lake District. No radio reception was available. Kindly note that this was a very terrible moment for my family, especially for my 17 month daughter and for my brother, suffering from reduced mobiltiy, since it was getting dark and cold and supplies were ending. We were really afraid in not going to make it through since we had never been through such a terrible experience.

Luckily enough, I spotted an emergency phonebox, and a cottage in the nearabouts where I have called the emergency service. From the nearby cottage, I have called the road assistance too claiming that a tow truck should arrive in 90 minutes. When the police arrived, they told me that from experience it was going to be more than 90 minutes, so they decided to take us to a safer place, which was situated about half an hour drive from the car location. They called the road assistance informing them of the place we were at.

At around 09:00pm I phoned back to the road assistance since the pickup truck hadn’t yet arrived. I told them that the place was going to close and to send the assistance as soon as possible. They told me that help would arrive soon. At 09:30pm – almost six hours after the car broke down, the tow truck from T.J’s came and picked us up. Together we proceeded in collecting the car and then headed back to Windermere. We arrived there at midnight, where we managed to get the car in a safe parking.

The following day, in the afternoon, we had to reach Manchester airport in order to fly back home, so in the early morning I phoned Thrifty car rental office in Trafford Park to see what was going to happen. The staff at the phone advised that I could get a replacement car, however it was going to be a standard car. I objected instantly since, I couldn’t fit all the luggage in a standard car, that was the primary reason for which I have rented a bigger car. Your staff insited that this was the only car available and offered no alternitaves. After several attempts in convincing your staff of my situation, she told me that she was going to call me back. After sometime she called back and told me that suddenly a Zafira was available. In the meantime, another tow truck from another different company (RAC), came to tow the faulty car. It took us quite some time to get the car on his equipment since it was parked in a parking lot, and it was raining heavily. I am still recovering from the cold.

The Zafira was delivered at 12:30 pm, just in time to do all the paper work, get all our stuff in the car and leave to the rental depot. We made only one stop during our way to Manchester, just the time to grab something to eat and then headed back to the depot were we handed over the car and keys at 05:30pm. As you can see almost the last 2 days of our holiday were ruined due to a malfunction of the car. My family is stressed out after this terrible experience.

To add insult to injury yesterday I received a call from your representative, intimating that after inspecting the car, the charges totalled to GBP680 had to be down on the driver. I rejected these accusations instantly and advised her that I was not going to pay a penny, since the malfunction was not caused by me. As a matter of fact I have enquired on this fault, where it has resulted that a clutch damage takes a long time to be caused.

In this regard I am asking you to clear all these charges instantly and I am demanding compensation for ruining our last days of our holiday and for delivering a faulty and unsafe car from the beginning, thus putting my whole family at risk. This is unacceptable.

Please note that this is the second negative incident we had with your company. Last year after renting a car from Manchester airport and delivering it back in Etrop Grange, I have handed the car keys to the receptionist in the hotel as agreed, with the difference that we were not provided transportation to the airport as per our previous agreement, leaving my family stranded at the doorstep with all our luggage. We had to call a taxi to get to the airport.

I was under the impression to make business with a serious company, but appareantly I was wrong.

Kindly revert at your earliest.

Brgds

Jason Muscat

"1)We waited for just over half an hour on a shuttle bus from Thrifty to pick us up; we saw each of the other rental companies come by in excess of 5 times each during that time, and we know that there was another group that waited even longer than we did. The driver had to be waved over when one did finally show up as they were empty, but about to keep on going...the security lady did this for us. I called the number on my sheet, but it was the general number for Thrifty because they don't show the numbers for the individual stations...I tried to explain the situation, but the person couldn't understand and I gave up trying because it was also loud on my end and then the shuttle showed up.

2) We got there and there was a lady and a man at the desk, the lady waited on us... She appeared in a very bad temper, and my husband commeneted on the fact that he understood it wasn't just a long day for us, but for her too...at which point she said she'd just gotten there at 10 am, so it wasn't a long day(would've been about an hour at this point). But she never once cracked a smile... this is minor, but now that we've had the experience we had with her, it seems important.

3) I had made a reservation only under my name, the car had not been paid for at all... we got to the counter and tried to give her my husband's card and i.d. as we wanted HIM to be the driver and she wouldn't let him be the driver. She said that even tho the car wasn't paid for yet, I had to be the driver and we'd have to pay extra. I didn't think this would be that much of a difference, and she didn't volunteer the info.

4) We kept going thru the charges and she told us we had to chose one of the three coverages which confused me as well. In Alabama insurance is mandatory on all vehicles but you can show proof of insurance on your own vehicle and they will accept this instead, if you don' want to ay the extra money. She didn;t offer that option, she said we had to choose one...so I started to say that we'd have to take the cheapest one and she was about to enter that when i said to hold on and actually questioned her about this and stated we had an insurance card we could show her...this is when she amended her 1st statement and said we didn't HAVE to get the coverage (and she seemed to get a bit pissed off at us now with a change in facial expression and her already not "happy" tone went to quite strained)up front & then settle thru our insurance company afterwards. I said that was just fine, because we had full coverage insurance that would cover a rental as well.

5) She handed us the receipt and went over the charges at which time we found out the extra driver cost $63 plus tax for the week. I didn' think it would be more than $25...it made no sense- there was no more risk involved... and she still insisted I had to be the primary driver, even tho at this point we had given her the card that had HIS name on it... so we just took him off as a driver and I drove the car.

6) Shesent us to spot 28, and there was no car there...my husband went back in but because I had to sign the contract I had to go back in and wait for her to redo the contract and resign it. Our DVD player was left either at spot 19, beside the inside bench where we stood waiting initially, or at the counter.I believe it had to be at the desk inside, unless it fell during the time he moved all of the bags from the one spot to the next while I was inside(she had told him which spot)... The last time he remembered having it was inside the rental bldg. I tried to call and report this Saturday the 19th...but was on hold too long...I calledWed am around 11 am and finally got thru, I was transferred to the Ohare lost and found. The mailbox was full- so that told me and my husband that SOMEbody is NOT taking the reports or updating their own files and people are being given a false sense that someone will help them.So I pushed the number for the manager. That person answered without giving a name, and I told them the mailbox was full and I needed to report a DVD player missing and he didn;t bother to take any info from me or give me any names or numbers in case i was cut off and he transferred me to some other guy who also didn;t answer with his name...I told him about the missing DVD player and he said he was going to tranfer me and I told him NOT to do so because LOST and found was full and was in the middle of telling him that I had just been transferred three times(once to lost and found, once to manager and once to him) when he cut me off and transferred me anyway(I never spoke to anyone more than 30 seconds b4 being handed off to someone else)... then I couldn;t tell you if the person answrred with a name or not...as the connection was terrible, and almost sounded as if I was being spoken to by 2 diff ppl...I kept saying 'hello" and twice i heard someone on the other end say "hello, hello" quite clearly. Then after a while of me trying to explain and say hello, etc...they hung up the phone on me.


I HAVE NEVER IN FORTY YEARS OF EXISTENCE had SOOOOO much trouble out of a rental company... AT THE VERY least they would never have cared which one of us was driving the car...maybe only one of us, but which would not have mattered as long as we were over 25 with a valid driver's license. I would have been hit with the sales pitch for insurance better never told i HAD to purchase it thru the rental company unless i could not prove I had insurance of my own. This was a HORRIBLE experience!!! "


After this email was sent to the Midway manager on 6/26/2010, as that was the only email address I was given, I received an email from him (mr. Bond) on 6/29/2010 stating he had forwarded the info to the person in charge of the Ohare office, but they had not found our DVD player. By 7/7/2010, i had not heard from him again, nor had the Ohare office called or written me me and I sent a reminder email. I was angry and was going to congtact the police over the DVD player, but i could not get help there as it had been too long with no report from me or from them. By 7/26/2010 I STILL had not heard from ANYONE via phone, email, or snail mail so i sent the following email(with no response still!):

"You need to get me the home office numbers for all corporate execs as soon as is humanly possible. Up to and including not just your district manager, but also the President of the company. YOU DO NOT want me to have to determine these things myself, as then I will be forced to say you also brushed me off. The OHare branch has YET to contact me a month later! Even if it was just to say "sorry for the problems but we can't do anything about it." NADA!!! NOTHING!!! Not a 10% off coupon, not an apology, not a "screw you"! I will certainly not recommend your business to anyone; and since I travel frequently, my father does, my father-in law and mother-in law and my husband's three sisters... ALL (except my dad) in and out of even the Chicago area FREQUENTLY... and SOOOO many others- it will affect your reputation! It won't be hearsay, it won't be slander (because it's TRUE); it is not maliciously being sent out to harm your company, as it is merely protecting others from dealing with the complete LACK of service we experienced!!! On facebook alone that would touch about 1000 people! I'm done with the trying to be nice and follow the rules/procedures... it was red tape meant to deter me from pursuing anything further. I am done with empty threats meant to convince somebody to DEAL with me. This is my FINAL request for resolution via your level of management."

As of 7/30/2010, still no word, and I am looking online for corporate emails and complaint phone numbers to no avail so far...just this website! Mr. Bond said I would at least get a call and probably a coupon, not enough...but better than being totally ignored. They are rude, they are evidently thieves (or at least one of them is), they lie to try and get you to pay more for insurance and extra drivers(as Mr. Bond told me in person that since it was just a reservation and nobody's card had been charged we COULD have changed the driver without being charged), and they lied(or Mr. Bond did, anyway) about what service would be done to try and make amends for the poor service that began all of this... I just now saw that they are evidently known for illegal price gauging from this site; so I would STRONGLY advise all to shun this company. You MAY be the lucky ones to come away without being stuck for extra charges, and you MAY come away with a pleasant sales rep and a good experience, but it seems the odds are against it.