Hotels.com review: Fraud with partners CarTrawler and America Car Rental in Mexico

I am writing to inform you of a fraud attempt your partners in our car rental booked for 12/5-12/12 in Mexico. We feel like we are being deceived and have requested a refund, which they are now denying.

When we arrived at the America Car Rental agency in San Jose Airport, we were told that we needed Third party liability. We told them that we may have this through our car rental company in Seattle, so we called and checked. However we were not covered by Third party by our insurance. Therefore, they said in order for us to rent the car, we would need to purchase Third party liability insurance from them directly at a cost of $350 (she wrote this on a small white piece of paper which I threw away). We did not know at the time that Third party liability insurance was already included in our policy with CarTrawler because this is a new requirement since the last time we were in Mexico. However America car rental agency insisted that we needed it and either didn’t bother to check that we were covered or wanted to extort the $350 from us (like they did to another couple who checked in at the same time). We did not want to pay the EXTRA $350 for the Third Party Liability (which I must remind you was already included), so we went elsewhere to rent a car, paying another $250.

Upon returning, we requested a refund from CarTrawler since we DID NOT rent the car and made an attempt to pick it up. It was the fault of America Car Rental who insisted that we purchase the extra Third party insurance when we already had it. It was no fault of ours that we didn’t rent with them, because had they seen that we already had the Third party insurance, we would have gladly rented from America, seeing that we were paying $81/week instead of what we ended up paying $250/week.

CarTrawler is now insisting that we didn’t have the funds to cover the deposit of $7000.00. The rental company is NOT being honest. We provided an American Express Platinum card which has NO SPENDING LIMIT. This card is only issued to those people with the highest credit and there would never be an issue of not having enough funds available. This is the same card that CarTrawler charged the $81.46. The issue was not the damage deposit, but that they wanted to charge us $350 for the Third Party Liability. But now they are denying that they wanted to charge us the $350 for the Third Party Liability and instead that we didn’t have the funds on our credit card, which is completely FALSE!

We have proof that we had both Third Party Liability and the card with $7000 to comply with the damage deposit. Therefore, their denial of our refund is unfounded and we can clearly see that there is much more happening here than what meets the eye…gross negligence or fraud. You cannot understand the level of frustration that this kind of behavior creates and it is not the proper or honest way to do business. Understand that this is $81.46 which is not a huge sum but this kind of extortion cannot be tolerated for any amount, large or small. America Car Rental is doing this to all of their customers and it's wrong!