Dead Battery, Worthless Car Rental Company

[canyonwalker]

Alaska Travelog #15
Seward - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 8:30pm

We got back from our day-long cruise to Kenai Fjords to an unpleasant surprise. Our car battery was dead. Well, not our car but our rental car. I'd thought the battery seemed weak the past two days when the starter motor seemed to turn sluggishly. Now it was completely dead— no lights, nothing.

If this were our car, we'd call AAA and be confident of what'd happen next. It's for situations like this that we've paid for AAA membership for over 25 years. But this was a rental car, so I called the rental company's roadside assistance hotline.

Avis was a complete waste of time. Long story short, I had to make two calls to them. Each took about 20 minutes. And at the end of nearly 45 minutes I had nothing. I'd have had to make a third call to get help.

• The first agent couldn't even find our contract. I hung up on him when it was obvious he hadn't figured out, yet wouldn't admit he hadn't figured it out, and also told me there'd be a penalty fee for them sending out a truck to jump-start the battery. "You're going to charge me extra for your busted car?" I shouted. "I'm the one losing my weekend to your busted car, you should be paying me!"
• The call with the second Avis agent started better— he at least was able to find my contract in the system, recognizing that Alaska has different ID numbers than the rest of the US— but after 20 minutes realized that he wouldn't be able to dispatch a truck anywhere in Alaska. Why couldn't that have been established in the first minute, when I clearly told him this was an Alaska rental and I was in Alaska?
• Also, the second agent confirmed that if, if, he were able to dispatch a tow truck to help me, I'd still have to pay a penalty fee for their dead battery. He at least had been supportive up until that point so I politely told him how offensive I find that policy and hung up gently.

Meanwhile Hawk had already called AAA for a jump-start. I'd asked her to call on her phone as a Plan B after the first failed attempt with Avis.



The tow truck dispatched by AAA arrived about an hour after Hawk started her call. That's not the fastest help we've ever gotten, but it's good that AAA at least had a contract with a company in Seward, as opposed to somewhere an hour or more away. We passed the time in the car reading news and stuff on our phones. We were parked legally in a parking lot, so among all the places we've ever experienced car trouble, it was one of the least concerning overall. It was just annoying that this happened on vacation and when we were hungry to go get dinner then relax in our hotel room. And for a Sunday evening at dinnertime, an hour wait seems reasonable. The driver even pulled up with what seemed like half his family in the truck with him. 😂

The driver jumped the car. It took a few tries with the ignition to get the engine to catch. The tow driver was unfazed and kept at it. The car came to life. "Keep it running for 20-30 minutes to make sure the battery's recharged," he advised. So we drove around town figuring out where to eat. And Hawk went shopping in a gift shop while I parked outside with the engine running.

Comments

[ojuang.livejournal.com]

WTF they charge you for a dead battery on a rental?
Adding Avis to Hertz on my list of rental companies to avoid.

[merhawk]

If we ended up towed, they would pay for it. Otherwise it was all on us. 😡

[canyonwalker]

It's getting so that car rental companies are like cable TV companies: they're all bad, and the worst is simply the one that screwed you most recently.

[canyonwalker]

Also, it's worth noting that Avis in Alaska is run by a licensee, not by Avis corporate. The licensee gets to set some of its own policies. I've been treated well by Avis (and its portfolio brand Budget) at virtually every other location I've rented from in the past several years.

[ckd]

I once had a Hertz car start overheating on me while in the lane waiting to re-enter the US from Canada. Luckily it lasted long enough to get through the border, at which point we parked it and called for roadside assistance. (I don't want to think about how much hassle getting a tow from the Canadian side would have been.)

Hertz did do a good job of service recovery that time, at least; we were towed to the BTV airport facility where they just gave us a new car. Unfortunately the delay meant we didn't beat the snowstorm that we'd been trying to race back to Boston. (Made it there later than planned, but safely.)

[some_other_dave]

Oh man... Unless you had left the lights on or some other drain, I would have taken it directly back to the closest desk of that company and told them to swap the car. A flat battery is usually either from an electrical drain (like leaving the lights on) or from the charging system not really charging the battery any more.

(I did have the exception a couple of months ago--the original battery from our 2015 CRV decided not to start the car any more. It was way under "empty" voltage, and it was probably 10 years old, so I decided to just swap it and see. No problems with the new battery.)

[merhawk]

We were 2.5 hrs away from the closest Avis in Anchorage. Otherwise we would have!

[canyonwalker]

Even before the battery died it did seem weak. The starter motor always seemed to turn sluggishly when I keyed the ignition, like the battery wasn't able to deliver it a strong enough current. That made me suspicious either the battery wasn't able to hold enough of a charge anymore or the electrical system was failing to recharge it properly. Like Hawk said in her comment, we would've returned the vehicle after the jump to ask for a swap, but the depot was 2.5 hours away. We were not going to interrupt our trip any more than the 60-75 minutes we already lost.

[some_other_dave]

Wow, 2.5 hours... Yeah, that would have been bad. Apparently I'm not used to the scale of things in Alaska!