Dear John: Perhaps you have addressed this “fees” issue in the past with regard to hotels, particularly resorts. But my issue is with car rentals.
There are not a lot of complaints about it because the bulk of car rentals are for business purposes, and who cares about fees when someone else is paying? I’ve had times where the fees were equal to or greater than the car rental itself.
And they are never mentioned in the advertised price of the car per day.
The enclosed bill from Avis is a good example. The $21 a day for three days — $63 before sales tax — becomes $83.03 before sales tax. Note the “security” fee, the energy recovery fee and finally the “tire battery fee.”
All of these are the cost of doing business and should, of course, be included in the advertised price.
Now, move into the biggies — concession recovery fee — which I presume is for the rent of the counter space and a place to store the cars. Again, this is the cost of doing business. And then the mystery “FTP” — who knows what this is? Then there is the last insult, the fact that there is sales tax on the fees.
Note also that because people rarely rent cars within their own state, the states can tax visitors at will without any recourse. So $83.63 is 33 percent more than the $63 advertised price. S.B.
Dear S.B.: Mystery solved. And you probably won’t believe it.
The charge that appears on your bill as “FTP SR$1.00 DY is (drumroll) a tax on the rewards points you are getting for renting the car.
Yes, unbelievable. But that’s what Avis told me when a company employee reluctantly broke the code for me.
And you missed one — the Veh License Recoup $0.80/DY. As unbelievable as it might sound, that’s an 80-cents-a-day charge to help Avis pay for the cost of keeping its vehicles registered.
You might ask: Why the hell am I paying for that? I dunno. But if you put the charge on the bill in a way that nobody can understand, I guess you can do anything.
I have no idea whether Avis is the only one that includes these nonsense charges, and whether it’s just in Florida, where you rented. But now everyone knows and can be irate along with S.B. and me.
I’m still trying to figure out why I’m paying “convenience charges” for tickets when I print them out at home. Shouldn’t the ticket-seller be paying me for the convenience of not having to mail them to me?
Dear John: Does a nonprofit organization pay property taxes? J.M.
Dear J.M.: A nonprofit can request an exemption from property taxes.
Some local governments are getting around this by making nonprofits pay something in lieu of taxes. The idea is to guilt the organization into paying something for municipal services because its employees benefit.
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