Major car hire firm hit with €1 million fine
Avis has been hit with a€1 million fineby Spain’s consumer ministry forabusive practices that left hire car customers out of pocket. Spanish consumer officials handed the car rental firm the maximum penalty. . .
Avis has been hit with a€1 million fineby Spain’s consumer ministry forabusive practices that left hire car customers out of pocket. Spanish consumer officials handed the car rental firm the maximum penalty possible after ruling its charges amounted to a very serious breach. Avis was adding between €33. 88 and €45 to bills under the heading of “administrative management of sanctions” whenever a driver collected a traffic fine while behind the wheel of one of its vehicles. How Avis hit customers with extra feesCustomers who got fined for speeding or other road offences found themselves paying not only the official fine but also an extra service charge from Avis. The firm claimed the money covered the cost of processing the fine and telling the authorities who was driving. Yet Spanish traffic law already forces the registered owner of any vehicle, in this case the rental company, to identify the driver. That duty sits in Article 11 of the Law on Traffic, Circulation of Motor Vehicles and Road Safety. Charging people for a job the company was legally obliged to carry out was judged an unfair contract term. It broke several sections of the General Law for the Defence of Consumers and Users by imposing an unbalanced cost that favoured the business over the customer. Why the practice broke the rulesA Basque consumer group, EKA/ACUV, brought the complaint that started the investigation. Officials concluded Avis had kept using the same clause even after it had already been declared illegal. Back in September 2020 a court in Vitoria-Gasteiz ruled the fine-management fee null and void, ordered the company to drop it from existing contracts and banned its use in future ones. Avis has also faced accusations of other sharp practices. These include billing for services punters never requested, targeting foreign holidaymakers in the hope they would stay quiet, and trawling old records to take money from credit cards used on previous hires. Earlier court ruling against AvisThe 2020 judgement already made clear that rental firms cannot pass on the cost of meeting their legal duty to name the driver. Despite that, the clause stayed in contracts, leading consumer authorities to treat the latest case as an aggravated offence. Anyone who has hired a car in Spain and later received an unexpected charge for a traffic fine can check official records through the Dirección General de Tráfico website or the miDGT app. Practical advice on spotting and paying Spanish speeding tickets appears in earlier Euro Weekly News coverage: How to check for traffic fines in Spain, What happens if you get nabbed by a speed camera and How to pay a Spanish traffic fine at a cashpoint. What comes next for the car hire firmThe administrative process is now closed, so Avis can still take the fine to the courts if it chooses to appeal. For the moment the €1 million fine stands as a clear warning to the wider rental sector during the busy summer period when most of its annual income arrives. Holidaymakers booking hire cars in Spain are advised to read the small print carefully and keep records of every charge. Official details of the decision can be found via theMinistry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and the 2030 Agenda.