The company is refusing to reimburse a rental charge for a reservation that "they made on my behalf" after telling me the reservation had failed to process.

I attempted to make a reservation online one evening via rentalcars.com. Both attempts resulted in a message popping up "Unable to process..." So I went and made a rental reservation with another company.

Seven hours later, early morning the next morning, I was sent a reservation confirmation email by this company. All I can figure is the failed transaction from the night before ended up in some queue somewhere and someone found it and put it through. I didn't do it. The rentalcars.com system did it or someone that works there did it. It's just a guess on my part what happened in the background at rentalcars.com.

Soooo, as soon as I noticed the reservation email in my email inbox, I cancelled the reservation and I notified them of the mix-up and explained what happened and asked them to refund the money charged to my credit card (their system wouldn't refund the rental charge claiming it was a same day rental). You won't believe this, but they told me (and I have it in writing), that same day reservations that are cancelled are not refunded.

Again, I told them what happened (in writing in email). They continue to claim that in the wee hours of the morning that I made the reservation, which I absolutely did not. I was physically not internet connected at that time. It was impossible for me to do that. They seem to have a website issue where they tell the prospective customer that transactions fail and then some number of hours later they put the transaction through.

It's not a lot of money. Just $33.80 USD. It's the principal. Their system is in error. I've not experienced a company being so difficult on a simple issue like this. Clearly they don't believe what I am telling them. Why would I go and reserve another car and spend more $ for the same size car for the same itinerary at the same location?

I've contacted my credit card company to dispute this and get it worked out.

I figured I'd share what has happened to warn everyone that rentalcars.com has website problems and they don't accept accountability when strange things happen as a result!

I won't be trying to rent through them again.