We were to fly out Sunday at 7:15 PM but received eight text messages of delays. Finally, when it was too late to do anything else, the flight was canceled. Over 100 people stood around gate four trying to find other avenues of travel to reach their destinations.
We waited in line to talk with representatives at gate 4 for several minutes. Nothing was being announced and we couldn’t get on allegiant airline website. It had crashed With no flights available for the next day as on allegiant the best they could do was a flight on Tuesday with four seats available or Thursday. We had to get home! Stat.
I called out from the queue “where’s our luggage?” At the carousel, was the response from a gatekeeper! Seeing nothing was being done to get anyone on flights other than allegiant, we went to the carousel to pick up our bags. There was a guest services woman who I asked for help. And, she was wonderful. She found us a hotel room at the Clarion and arranged for shuttle service. Now, we had a room for the night.
We hold our luggage with us and went to the rental car counter. Most were closed up, but one window was open. A woman and a man had just secured the last, one way car. She offered to split the rental with us and drive to Florida. Well, we didn’t take that offer. And looking back, how could it have been a legitimate one-way rental when as we found out a few minutes later, they never do one-way rentals from the airport rental fleet.
At 12:30 AM at the Clarion hotel, we had run out of options for renting a car to drive home! So, Mark made a phone call to budget car rental finding a phone number on a Google search. Well, that turned out to be an interesting conversation. Mark got someone by the name of Victor operating in a very noisy background likely in a very foreign country. Twice we thought we had been abandoned, but Victor came back on the line and reassured Mark that he was working on it.
Victor found a Ford focus or similar car, one-way to Florida, one way for $986 through Hertz. Mark signed off on it on his cell phone. (I I was, meanwhile, searching for other flights to Florida. One way seats for two of us would be $1200. Allegiant Doesn’t have reciprocity cooperation from other airlines and we felt backed into a corner.
The next morning at the Hertz rental car window at Asheville airport at 7:10 another gracious woman was checking in to her job. She opened the window for us and asked what we needed. Well, there was no car rental information for us there. Obviously, we had been scammed. She thought perhaps it could have been a “corporate” rental and left her post to walk down to the garage to see if there was a car available or if anyone knew about it. Well, the rental car manager from the garage found us a Camry and was having it washed for us. When the woman at the rental wicket rang it up, she was shocked to see that it was 500 and some dollars. She thought that was a terrible price … but we told her we had been quoted $986. She said well there’s nothing on here to indicate that you paid anything last night. So, we left her a nice tip and got in the car and drove all day to get home to Florida.
Once home, I called the credit card company and found out that there was a 400 and some odd dollar charge going through under “car rental” … And another for actual payment we had authorized at Hertz.
Had we been duped? I started a dispute with the “car rental” charge but will not know an outcome until late May.
The scammers online are shrewd operators . Mark called budget car rental, with the phone number on Google, and wound up with a Hertz rental and a finders fee paid to the scammers. What a world we live in.
