Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Rental Car Clerk = Insurance Pusher

That’s one of the revelations exposed in Alex Frankel’s new book Punching In, where he went to work at the bottom in a variety of companies: Starbucks, Apple, The Gap, and…Enterprise Rent-a-Car. He gives a little taste of what he learned from the latter in this Budget Travel article, Confessions of a rental car salesman.

In another review I read of this book they pulled a passage out saying basically that from the get-go you are trained to aggressively and persistently try to upsell customers into buying as much insurance as possible, even when they clearly don’t need it. (Which is most of the time, if they have a decent credit card and their own decent car insurance.) This is where the fat profit margins are since accidents are statistically rare and most of the time the customer’s own policy will pay first anyway.

Frequent business travelers who rent cars week after week without a corporate contract sometimes get pushed to the breaking point from the incessant upselling. I’ve seen a few customers go ballistic and start yelling, “Shut up!! I DON’T WANT INSURANCE! Just stop talking!”

Which brings us to this great quote from the article linked above. “Finally, if you can avoid interacting with a person at a rental car company you will often find that you have a better experience.” How do you manage this? If you rent fairly often, join the company’s frequent renter club (most are free) so you can bypass the lines and go straight to your car.

One caveat on insurance: international rentals. If you are renting a car in a foreign country, you may want to at least get liability coverage, perhaps more. Many credit cards cover you abroad, but even the best routinely exclude seemingly random countries such as Ireland, Israel, and Jamaica. (If someone can figure out what these three have in common, please enlighten us. )

[flickr rental car line photo from erin.barata]