Fwd: Attn: Customer Service, Ref: 0000916696605, regarding additional "detail clean charges"

[zach vorhies]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: zach vorhies <zach.v...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:16 PM
Subject: Attn: Customer Service, Ref: 0000916696605, regarding additional "detail clean charges"
To: btr-custo...@avisbudget.com


Reference number: 0000916696605

Reason for email:

Budget Rental Center, located in Mountain View at old middlefield road, charged us an additional $300 cleaning fee for a "detailing truck for dust". We believe this is unreasonable and outside of the bounds of the contract.

Contact Phone number: Zach Vorhies @ 541-606-2802

Please see attached photos of vehicle.

Summary of what happened:

On August 28th, 2010, we picked up a 15' budget rental truck to store equipment for the 2010 Burning Man festival. When I (Zach Vorhies) came to pick up the truck on the Saturday, the 28th of August, I was presented with an additional contract stating that if I were to bring the Truck into the Burning Man Festival we would take on an additional liability of $1000 or more if the truck came back which was not "free of dust". I was not told of this additional liability requirement on the phone and if I had our group would have chosen U-Haul, which does not have this liability requirement. Because of the time that the rental was being acquired, we did not have sufficient time find alternative transportation.

Therefore, we requested a slight modification to the liability contract to which it stated that we would not bring the truck into the burning man festival but that we would be dropping off the vehicle in Gerlach, which was the town adjacent to the festival. We did this with the intention of limiting our liability and limiting the exposure of the truck to the harmful environment of the location in which the festival was taken place. This environment is a geographic land formation known as a "Playa" which is an ancient dried up lake bed which is slightly alkaline in nature. Leaving the truck outside of the festival took significant effort on our part but we did this in order to live up to the obligation of the contract.

A copy of this contract should be on file. If your representative hasn't provided it, then we can provide it by fax or email.

Before we returned the vehicle, we power washed the outside and inside, and wiped down the interior compartment with a wet towel and damp cloth. When we returned the vehicle, it was in better shape then when we rented it.

However, on return of the vehicle, your store representative noticed that there was some dust in the interior and therefore charged us $300 for detailing. We attempted to meet him half way by asking him to allow us to clean up any remaining residue to bring it up to his standard of "free of dust", however he refused as we had already returned the vehicle and would not let us clean it unless we rented the vehicle out for another day!

In summary, here are our complaints:

1) Budget did a "bait and switch", by hiding the fact of extra-ordinary liabilities when we reserved the vehicle with the expectation that revealing such extra-ordinary liabilities would have caused us to seek out one of your competitors.

2) That we satisfied the obligations of the contract by not bringing the truck into the festival yet we are still being assessed a cleaning fee. Therefore Budget is violating the contract in which we signed.

3) We made a reasonable effort to bring the truck back to a state in which it was cleaner than when we got it. When we were told that the truck was not up to standard, we were denied access to clean the truck to meet such standards.

4) $300 is an unreasonable amount to charge for cleanup of dust residue in the interior. Additionally your representative would not provide information on where and what process was used to clean up any residue. When we had checked around San Francisco the going rate for a cleanup of a 15' truck was around $60.

We ask kindly that given the above statements of fact that Budget refund our $240 of our $300 cleaning fee. We believe that $60 is sufficient to clear any dust residue.

Otherwise, we intend to do the following:

1) File a complaint against the store Budget Store located at 2452 Old MiddleField Way, Mountain View, CA 94043, with the better business bureau (www.bbb.org)

2) Report our negative experience with your company with local search engines such as Yelp, Google Local Business Search, Bing Maps, etc... from each one of our camp members

3) Bring a civil suit against Budget for violating California's Bait and Switch Law: BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONS CODE SECTION 17500-17509. (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&group=17001-18000&file=17500-17509) for the additional amount of $1,500 + $300 + legal fees.

We look forward to hearing from you. You may contact me at:

Zach Vorhies:

(541)606-2802

805 Shrader, Apt A

San Francisco CA 94117

or contact me at 

zach.v...@gmail.com

[Serega Fyodorov]

Go Zach, git ir done!!!!! tell em Budget scammers who is boss!!!!! -[ ;-}

SeReGa

[Olya K]

wow, Zach, nice going!
btw we do know a lawyer if it ever comes to anything like that.. he can consult/help out

[zach vorhies]

The civil lawsuit is just a bluff, I have no intention of bringing them to court, unless a lawyer says that we could make that $1500 which I highly doubt. I really just want our $300 bucks back and for the guy behind the counter to be more honest with next years burners.

~Zach

[Nick Bilogorskiy]

I also commend you for this Zach.

However, am I the only one who thinks this is going a bit far. It's less than $10 per person, not something I'd want to be involved in a court suit for.
And also, as much as I don't want us to pay the $$$ we knew they will charge us if we take it to Burning Man and bring it back dusty. We also knew that it's near impossible to clean up all the dust. So it was a gamble to begin with, as always is when taking a rental to BM.
Sometimes you get lucky sometimes you don't. So while I agree we should have went with UHaul (although according to http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?t=29025 uHaul has the same rules), and that 300 is too much to charge for cleaning, I don't see this as a huge deal.
We broke their rules, we lied about not taking it to the burn, and I don't see that we should really go much further fighting this. I don't think they give a crap about yelp ratings.
It would be good if this threat letter works, but if it doesn't I think we should suck it up and learn from this.

Thoughts?

Nick

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:42 PM, Olya K <kras...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Pavel Reznikov]

Zach, do you know the name of the clerk who charged you $300? That maybe helpful to mention, so they could spank him.

[zach vorhies]

I'm not bringing this to court, it's was a bluff.

Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, and in all other cases you buy insurance. We bought insurance, we paid an incredible amount of money for it to protect us from liability issues. The total for insurance was $409. They took our money, and then they took more because they are greedy and they thought we would roll over and do nothing. However, I've dealt with these companies before - the ones that rely on apathy to overcharge their customers - and they usually break as soon as you call the better business bureau and report their dishonest business dealings.

Just so you know, I calculated the daily rate to be $224/day. So f*ck them.

~Zach

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Nick Bilogorskiy <nbilog...@gmail.com> wrote:

[zach vorhies]

Good call pavel, just sent them the name.

[Nikita Kozlovskij]

uhm, don't waste your time with complaints, letters, bbb/yelp. small claims is lot faster and effective and takes less than 10 minutes. 

let me know if you need help, I can get any amount of money back from Budget. done this dozens of times with about 90% success rate.

- krakadil

p.s. awesome burn. thanks.

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, zach vorhies <zach.v...@gmail.com> wrote:

[zach vorhies]

Good news everyone! I followed up with the Budget and they are refunding $245 of the cleaning fee! They said that they have had a lot of complaints with that rental agency. Therefore, I'm going to downvote them on yelp (two stars) so other burners don't get hit by this. I don't think that we should all do it though since we did get money back.

The final cost is therefore
$1792 + $80 - $245 = $1627

See yah guys at the sweat shop tonight!

~Zach

[Masha Matveyeva]

whoohooo

Good job!!!!

 

C Ya

[Erast Dasari]

Great news Zach, never doubted you!

Please excuse the brevity of this message sent from my wireless device.

[Pavel Reznikov]

Zach, two thumbs up!

[Olya K]

Super!!

Time to submit gas receipts.. and other expenses. Let's aim for getting all that in to me or Rita by early next week, so we can have everyone reimbursed by end of next week

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Erast Dasari <erast....@gmail.com> wrote:

[Mariasha]

good job baby proud of you :)

On Sep 10, 3:10 pm, zach vorhies <zach.vorh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Good news everyone! I followed up with the Budget and they are refunding
> $245 of the cleaning fee! They said that they have had a lot of complaints
> with that rental agency. Therefore, I'm going to downvote them on yelp (two
> stars) so other burners don't get hit by this. I don't think that we should
> all do it though since we did get money back.
>
> The final cost is therefore
> $1792 + $80 - $245 = $1627
>
> See yah guys at the sweat shop tonight!
>
> ~Zach
>
> On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 9:05 PM, Nikita Kozlovskij <nik...@novoeradio.com>wrote:
>
>
>
> > uhm, don't waste your time with complaints, letters, bbb/yelp. small claims
> > is lot faster and effective and takes less than 10 minutes.
>
> > let me know if you need help, I can get any amount of money back from
> > Budget. done this dozens of times with about 90% success rate.
>
> > - krakadil
>
> > p.s. awesome burn. thanks.
>

> >>http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=bpc&group=17001...)

> >> for the additional amount of $1,500 + $300 + legal fees.
>
> >> We look forward to hearing from you. You may contact me at:
> >> Zach Vorhies:
> >> (541)606-2802
> >> 805 Shrader, Apt A
> >> San Francisco CA 94117
>
> >> or contact me at

> >> zach.vorh...@gmail.com

[Tatyana Galova]

woohoo. good job Zack!

[Serega Fyodorov]

Flawless Victory

SeReGa

[Daniel Reznikov]

Excellent. Good job Zach. 

Pls Excuse my Israeli brevity 

Sent from my iPhone

[margarita grabarova]

wooohooo :)