Corporate Rate Frauds

As a follow up to the last week's story about car dashboards - an addendum from my rental experience.

It was a 2-day trip to Germany. My company has a rental agreement with SIXT, with some preferential rebates and integrated invoicing, so I went there without thinking too much.

I liked SIXT in the past for their quite seamless "skip the line" online check-in (scan the driver's license and an ID, get a code to open a lockbox with the car keys). And it went OK like that this time too.

But there were several things that were not OK. 

During the booking process I got a number of really silly-looking options. Like "get Bluetooth for 5 EUR/day". And then "get Apple CarPlay" for additional 5 EUR/day. CarPlay requires Bluetooth so technically selecting it should select the Bluetooth option too... "Get parking sensors for 5 EUR/day".... the list was long.

SIXT are you serious? There is no way to enable / disable these options remotely (or maybe there is?) so asking for paying for those basic options as daily rate add-ons is simply a fraud. I did not pay for any of these and got all of them (all cars have them now). But was my usage of Bluetooth a violation of the rental contract?

Then there was the issue with the base "corporate rate" itself. It seemed a bit high (even after the rebates). Quick on-line check showed the same car rented through Booking or Expedia was 40% cheaper.

The scheme is broad though. Last week we had a committee meeting hosted by one of big member companies. They offered their corporate rate at local hotels. Again the Booking.com rate was significantly less. No strings attached.

The airline industry definitely championed the corporate rate fraud opportunity: book a higher / more expensive booking class to earn more loyalty points and "do not show the booking class on the invoice / receipt". Now the scheme is spreading much wider. Milk the corporate customers as often they do not have capacity to verify the price was not inflated.