TheStar.com - Business - Read car-rental terms carefully to avoid extra costs
September 05, 2009
Ellen Roseman
When renting a car, do you read the rental agreement carefully before driving off?
If not, pay heed to this story.
Jacqueline Boone, who lives in England, had an accident in a rented car while visiting Toronto in 2006. While driving out of an underground parking lot downtown, she swerved to avoid a head-on collision with a car coming down and hit a wall.
Boone called the company, Advantage Car & Truck Rentals, immediately to report the damage.
She believed she was protected from extra costs since she had paid $25 a day for a loss-damage waiver, which is supposed to cover repairs to a rental car in an accident.
But when she checked her credit card bill online, she found an extra $5,558 in costs for the transaction.
Advantage later wrote to say repair costs weren't covered because of a clause in its contract that excluded collisions with a stationary object – that is, a wall.
With her husband, Boone decided to fight Advantage in Ontario's small claims court. She found the forms online and prepared a case.
She said the car rental office near the airport was poorly lit in the evening when she arrived. It was virtually impossible to read the terms and conditions in the agreement. Also, the clause excluding collisions with stationary objects was never brought to her attention. She wasn't asked to initial it, as with other parts of the contract.
"Jackie asked the clerk whether we would be covered for everything with the loss-damage waiver that we purchased at an exorbitant rate. He said we would be," Robert Boone says.
In July 2008, Boone flew to Toronto for her day in court. She faced several lawyers on the other side. "My wife has no legal training, but with help from guidelines downloaded from the Attorney General's website, she put the case together and won it," her proud husband says.
She cited another case, Tilden Rent-A-Car vs. Clendenning, in which the contract denied coverage for accidents if the driver had consumed any alcohol.
Clendenning hit a pole after having consumed alcohol and pleaded guilty to impaired driving. He won in court when the rental company wouldn't pay for the damage.
In the Ontario court of appeal in 1978, Justice Charles Dubin said many standard-form contracts are signed without being read and understood.
A company seeking to rely on "stringent and onerous provisions" in a contract shouldn't be able to do so without having first taken reasonable measures to draw the terms to the other party's attention, he said.
Advantage launched an appeal, which was dismissed on June 2 of this year.
Superior court judge Andromache Karakatsanis said the small claims court judge had not made any errors.
In the circumstances of the case, a reasonable person would have known that Boone was not consenting to the exclusion, notwithstanding the clause in the written contract, she said.
"Advantage stands behind the facts and allegations made by it in the court proceedings, which are now a matter of public record," company spokesman Bruce Taylor says about the case.
The company was ordered to pay for the repair costs, plus $8,000 in court costs.
The Boones hired a lawyer for the appeal, so they're still out of pocket.
They hope to inspire others to fight against contracts with unfair terms.
"We are the kind of people who stand up for what they believe in and will not be bullied when we have been wronged," Boone says.
"I hope that a precedent has been set for all those who are wrongly treated by car rental firms to stand up and be counted."
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