Rental car users are being warned to read the fine print after one Wellington man was stung by two administration charges for an unpaid toll road.
John Byrne ended up paying $64.40 for using the Northern Gateway toll - a road that normally costs just $4.60 for a return trip.
That's because he didn't realise that his rental car company - Go Rentals - charges an administration fee of $25 each time it pays for a toll on behalf of its customers.
"I believed that it would come back to the rental company and they would just debit my Visa account for it," he said.
John agrees he's responsible for the fee - after all, he signed the paperwork (and he's already paid the fee as well) but reckons Go Rentals should have warned him of the charge, because he had a discussion with the staff member about using that specific toll road when he collected the car.
"They said I'd probably go through a toll gate somewhere up there near Warkworth. But there was no discussion about a $25 administration fee per toll," John said.
All the major rental car companies charge administration fees for paying tolls, and Go Rentals charge is one of the lowest. The company says its charge is based on about an hour's worth of staff time to pay the toll, and then let the customer know about it.
"Unfortunately it's a paper-based system, so it starts with collecting the mail, transferring liability. So there's a bunch of correspondence that we need to go through and a processing at our end to handle the situation," said James Dalglish of Go Rentals.
None of the other companies responded to Fair Go's request for comment about their fees except Thrifty, which says it tries to bundle return trips into a single admin fee of $25, to keep costs down.
Fair Go found one company - Jucy Rentals - charging $60 per toll notice, meaning $120 in charges for a return trip - plus, of course, the cost of the actual toll.
If a car rental company doesn't have an account for the car involved, that means NZTA also charges its own administration fee to send the notice out, incurring a toll of $7.20 - all of which is passed on to the customer.
"If the driver forgets or doesn't pay that's a problem that we have to sort out," James Dalglish said.
He says all customers are provided with the terms and conditions when they make their bookings - but acknowledged that meant customers had to rely on their memory at the time of pick up to remember all the clauses and applicable fees.
"[The] reality is there's a possibility the customer might not read those, and that's their choice," he said.
But Go Rentals says it's now looking at how staff can better inform customers about their fees, off the back of John Byrne's feedback.
Anyone who uses a toll road is able to pay the minimum charge within five days, by going online and entering their licence plate number.
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