Car hire company - devious, stupid or just plain dishonest?
Discussion
Background:
OH's car gets dinged in a car park while she nipped into the shop for two minutes. No note, but unless the car turnaround rate in the space next to her was really, really fast, coupled with suspicious Audi coloured marks on it, it was fairly obvious which car it was. She hung around for a while, but the other driver didn't return in that time.
She called the insurance company despite me suggesting that hell, chance, and snowball sprang to mind as the likelihood of successfully claiming from the other party. This was counteracted by protestations of fairness and right which I took to be my cue to shut up.
She gave their car details, and made it clear that she wouldn't be claiming from her own insurance if the other party didn't admit liability, the car was fine to drive and the damage was just cosmetic.
Within 20 minutes of that phone call, an, ermm, enterprising car hire company calls to say we've got a car ready for you, when would you like to pick it up. No, the car's driveable, we'll call if we need to arrange hire whilst the OH's is in the bodyshop.
Anyway, surprise surprise, no admission of liability from the other party, no CCTV footage, no witnesses, so OH phones the insurance company, direct, on Monday to tell them to close the case.
Today:
Hire car company phones again -
HC: Hello, madam, yes the other party in your claim have admitted liability and accepted the hire car charges, when would you like to pick the car up?
OH: Really? Are you sure?
HC: Yes, they've admitted liability and we've charged them directly, when would you like the car?
OH: But the other party didn't admit liability, and the case has now been closed.
HC: putting you on hold
HC: OK, we've closed that for you. Bye.
So - car hire company that clearly seems to be the preferred choice of the insurance company blatantly lying, surely? What would have happened if the OH had accepted the car hire company's word and picked up a car - would she have then been liable for any charges incurred? I can't see the insurance company picking up the tab willingly, or the car hire place admitting to an error and waving the charges.
As if over inflated hire charges to insurance companies aren't bad enough, they're now taking to phoning people and claiming things that clearly aren't true in order to drum up business?
Hell, I can almost feel a strongly worded email coming on
OH's car gets dinged in a car park while she nipped into the shop for two minutes. No note, but unless the car turnaround rate in the space next to her was really, really fast, coupled with suspicious Audi coloured marks on it, it was fairly obvious which car it was. She hung around for a while, but the other driver didn't return in that time.
She called the insurance company despite me suggesting that hell, chance, and snowball sprang to mind as the likelihood of successfully claiming from the other party. This was counteracted by protestations of fairness and right which I took to be my cue to shut up.
She gave their car details, and made it clear that she wouldn't be claiming from her own insurance if the other party didn't admit liability, the car was fine to drive and the damage was just cosmetic.
Within 20 minutes of that phone call, an, ermm, enterprising car hire company calls to say we've got a car ready for you, when would you like to pick it up. No, the car's driveable, we'll call if we need to arrange hire whilst the OH's is in the bodyshop.
Anyway, surprise surprise, no admission of liability from the other party, no CCTV footage, no witnesses, so OH phones the insurance company, direct, on Monday to tell them to close the case.
Today:
Hire car company phones again -
HC: Hello, madam, yes the other party in your claim have admitted liability and accepted the hire car charges, when would you like to pick the car up?
OH: Really? Are you sure?
HC: Yes, they've admitted liability and we've charged them directly, when would you like the car?
OH: But the other party didn't admit liability, and the case has now been closed.
HC: putting you on hold
HC: OK, we've closed that for you. Bye.
So - car hire company that clearly seems to be the preferred choice of the insurance company blatantly lying, surely? What would have happened if the OH had accepted the car hire company's word and picked up a car - would she have then been liable for any charges incurred? I can't see the insurance company picking up the tab willingly, or the car hire place admitting to an error and waving the charges.
As if over inflated hire charges to insurance companies aren't bad enough, they're now taking to phoning people and claiming things that clearly aren't true in order to drum up business?
Hell, I can almost feel a strongly worded email coming on
Tyngwndwn said:
Yes I think it's getting stupid 90% of my incoming phone calls where from people wanting money for some thing or other.
Yep, tell me about it. Even had some company trying to persuade me to buy a website from them, and after pointing out I already had one, tried to convince me of the value of having more than one website 
She ended the conversation fairly quickly after I told her not to be so ridiculous.It's just the seemingly blatant lying that's really wound me up over this one. Try as I might to give them the benefit of the doubt that they'd just made a stupid error, I just don't see how, nor why they'd consider themselves to be a position to inform the OH of developments regarding the other party's admission of liability.
-up or greed, I'm sure it wouldn't have ended well for you had you gone ahead. Well done for steering clear.Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff