Most travelers worry about things like flight delays, lost luggage or surprise hotel fees.
Probably not many have “rental car gets repossessed during the trip” on their travel bingo card. 😳
When you rent a car, you realize that some things can sometimes go wrong. A tire could go flat. The radio doesn’t work. I once got a rental car that, I discovered a few days later, had no windshield wiper fluid (I bought a container of the stuff, refilled the reservoir, and submitted the receipt to the rental car company – they reimbursed me).
What you don’t expect to happen? That your rental car will be repossessed in the middle of your rental. But that’s exactly what happened to a TikToker who goes by the handle @thepeopleschamp31.
The Atlanta resident had rented a car in San Antonio. She said in her video that while she was eating lunch, she noticed that someone was putting a boot on the car.
“I walked out and said, ‘Sir, I think you may have [made] a mistake. I’m not sure why you’re putting a boot on the car,’” @thepeopleschamp31 recalled in her video. “He said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you this, but this car is up for repossession.’”
The TikTokker explained this caused a lot of issues. Most importantly, she was in San Antonio, needed to get to Dallas for her flight and now she didn’t have a rental car.
I guess I should mention here that the TikTokker had rented her car from Turo – so she was renting an individual’s car, not one from a corporate entity like Hertz, Avis, or Alamo. And now you may or may not have the rest of the story in your head already. But still…read on.
“I understand people fall on hard times. I get that,” the TikToker said of the car owner. “However, what I do not get is the fact that you would allow someone to be in a predicament [where] they could have potentially missed their flight, they could potentially miss a wedding — they could potentially miss something big or grand that they may had already planned because of your negligence, because of your incapacity to truly think about others.”
@thepeopleschamp31 said the person who rented the vehicle apologized to her, but also thought that wasn’t enough.
“Your ‘sorry’ don’t cut it,” she says. “Maybe you should not have had the car in an ability to rent if you knew it was in this status.”
Here’s the video:
@thepeopleschamp31 #greenscreen I still can’t believe that the car that I rented was repossessed!!!
In a follow-up video, @thepeopleschamp31 explained that she has rented from Turo “a number of times” and had “never had a problem with this.” She also said that, to their credit, Turo immediately processed a refund for the car.
Some people who replied to the video suggested that she should have just rented from a bigger, more established car rental company. But she replied that the car she ended up renting from Enterprise cost as much for a single day as the Turo rental did for 4 days.
Well, yeah. And a car from Enterprise wouldn’t have been repossessed either. And IF something happened to it, the company could have given her a replacement car.
But I get it – rental car prices, especially when you add all the extras, are crazy expensive. But still…
Anyway, @thepeopleschamp31 had suggestions for Turo.
“Turo, if you are watching this video, if you don’t have a clause that requires hosts to provide documentation that their cars are in good standing, I would recommend that you do that,” she says. “Because as you can see, people are so quick to downgrade a company based on an individual’s actions.”
Here’s the follow-up video:
@thepeopleschamp31
At the end of the day, this probably falls into the category of “extremely rare travel nightmares.”
Most people who rent cars through peer-to-peer services never experience anything remotely like this.
But the story does highlight one of the biggest differences between renting from an individual versus a major rental car company.
With a traditional rental company, if something goes wrong with the vehicle, there’s usually another car, another office, and a corporate system in place to help fix the situation.
With peer-to-peer rentals, though, you’re often depending entirely on the individual owner to keep the vehicle maintained, insured, legal…and apparently not on the verge of repossession.
And while saving hundreds of dollars on a rental can absolutely be worth it for many travelers, stories like this are a reminder that sometimes the lower price comes with risks people never even considered.
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