Car Rental Avis (icon image): "More than $8,000 charge"
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Luke MacGregor / Reuters/ REUTERS
It has probably happened to some before: you rent a car and then there are hidden costs.
Then you grumble and pay the bill.
But in the case of Canadian Giovanna Boniface, that wasn't an option - the rental car company Avis had charged her 9,100 Canadian dollars (about 7,000 euros) for a three-day car rental because she was said to have driven 36,000 kilometers.
Canadian TV broadcaster CTV News reports that Boniface flew from Vancouver to Toronto to help her daughter get started at university.
She rented a GMC Yukon Denali car at the airport and for the three days that followed traveled between the airport, downtown Toronto and the city of Kitchener, where she was visiting her mother-in-law.
In total, she drove about 300 kilometers until she returned the car at the airport.
Then she checked in for a flight to Europe.
25 cents per kilometer
While waiting for the plane, she wanted to check whether the money had already been debited from her account.
"That's when I noticed this charge of more than $8,000 from Avis," Boniface told CTV News.
She had already paid $1,000 in advance.
She then looked at the receipt and found that the landlord had charged her 36,482 kilometers at a rate of 25 cents per kilometer.
To do this, she would have had to drive 500 km/h for about 72 hours straight – and she would have missed only about 4000 kilometers to circumnavigate the world.
"The first thing I wanted to do was go back through security and just go to the counter," Boniface said.
"But I didn't have time for that because the queues at the security check were very long." At first she couldn't reach anyone on the phone. Avis only responded after her arrival in Europe, but apparently didn't understand what the problem was.
That only changed after media reports.
Avis apologizes
Several days after returning the car, she received a call from Avis.
The company said it apologized and refunded the money, according to CTV.
Avis did not explain how the error could have happened.
Boniface wrote on Twitter that she got her money back nine days after the car rental.
Avis said it was a "human error".
Boniface thanked Twitter for the support.
She told CTV, "Overall, it wasn't good customer service."
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