A woman who rented a car during her three-day stay in Toronto was surprised to pay $8,000 when the company claimed to have driven 36,000 kilometers, a distance roughly the circumference of the Earth.
CTV News reports that Giovanna Boniface, a Vancouver resident, rented a car from Avis when she arrived at Toronto’s Pearson Airport to help her daughter settle into college.
In total, she claimed to have traveled nearly 300 kilometers between downtown Toronto and Kitchener before returning to Europe.
Ms. Boniface paid nearly $1,000 up front for the car rental. While wanting to check that the debit was actually made on her credit card, she noticed a problem.
“That’s when I noticed that Avis had charged over $8,000,” she told the outlet.
She looked at her receipt, then saw that the rental company had charged her for 36,482 kilometers at 25 cents per kilometer.
She claimed that “the first thing I wanted to do was go back through security and go to the table.” “But I didn’t have time to do that because the security lines were really long.”
The difficulties do not end there as it was almost impossible for Mrs. Boniface to join the rental company. After not answering the counter in Toronto, calling the public number did not make the situation worse.
“It seems they didn’t understand my problem, and I really needed them to remove this $8,000 fee,” she explained.
After trying to cancel the transaction with Visa, which was not possible since the transaction was still pending, Avis informed her a few days later that the additional fee would be refunded once the story was resolved in the media.
“The most frustrating thing is not being able to get to customer service in a reasonable time,” she said.
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