A woman says a rental car charged her $8,000 Canadian dollars (around $6,200 in US) after claiming she’d driven nearly 23,000 miles in the span of just three days.
Vancouver woman Giovanna Boniface told CTV News that she had been in Toronto to help her daughter settle in at university and drove about 300 miles in a rental car hired from Avis at Toronto’s international airport.
Ms Boniface said she had visited Kitchener (about 90 miles from Toronto) with her mother-in-law during a three day trip but had driven nowhere else while in Canada’s largest city.
Upon returning her rental car, Avis allegedly billed Ms Boniface $8,000 for putting 23,000 miles on the vehicle – about the distance of driving from Toronto to Cape Town, South Africa, three times.
The globe’s circumference, in comparison, is 24,850 miles – meaning Avis has also suggested that Ms Boniface had driven nearly a complete lap of the world in the space of 72 hours.
Ms Boniface had already checked into a flight bound for Europe when she noticed the charge, and told CTV News that she spent the following hours and days phoning Avis to complain, but to no avail.
“The first thing I wanted to do was actually go back through security and just walk to the counter,” she said upon seeing her bank statement. “But I wouldn’t have had time to do that because the security lines were really long.”
After landing in Paris, she tried phoning Avis again but still struggled to get an answer and said: “It was just ringing and ringing and no one was answering. It was really frustrating just trying to get to somebody.”
Avis, which Ms Boniface said “didn’t seem to really get what my issue was”, eventually apologised and promised to refund the extra charges after she alerted news media to her situation, the report said.
“Overall, it was not good customer service,” Ms Boniface added. “The most frustrating thing was not getting through to customer service in any kind of timely way.”
The Independent has approached Avis for comment.
