This happened to me for the first time this week, since it was the first time I used Dollar / Thrifty. Avis and Alamo / National never did this to me.
I think they are doing it to prevent people who use the car for less than, say, 20 miles, and then return it with the gauge still reading “full” even though they’ve used a gallon of gas.
Let’s say you rent a car at the airport and drive to a hotel less than 10 miles away. The car is full of gas when you get it. You use the car for only 20 miles, and when you return it, the fuel gauge still says “full” even though you’ve used it for 20 miles, which obviously requires some gas. Without a receipt, they only have your word that you refilled it, which you could lie about. You’ve gotten 20 miles of free gas. That’s what they are trying to prevent.
However, requiring a receipt is a short-sighted solution, since you could have filled a friend’s car up instead of theirs, or just picked up someone else’s receipt at the gas station (how many times have you seen others’ receipts hanging out of the pumps or lying on the ground?).
The fuel gauges in cars are non-linear, reading “full” even when they are not full, and reading “empty” even before they are empty (to help avoid running out of gas).
In my case, since I had used the car for well over 300 miles over 4 days, as indicated by the odometer, it was obvious that I needed to fill the tank for it to show “full”, and that I could not have simply driven it from the airport to a hotel and back and lied about filling it back up. So the lady reluctantly agreed to waive the fee without a receipt, but told me to remember Dollar’s policy next time.
Some companies waive this fee even without a receipt if the odometer shows you’ve driven more than a certain mileage, but Dollar / Thrifty does not seem to have this policy — they always want a receipt even if you drove the car 1000 miles across two weeks.
Here are some more customer-friendly ways to handle it:
1. If the person drives the car for short distances, say less than 50 miles, then accept that it might not be as full of gas as when they got it, even though the gauge still reads “full”, but accept it as a cost of doing business, and that on average, customers and rental companies will be happy as long as the car is returned with the gauge at “full” or above, meaning roughly plus or minus a gallon. Don’t get worked up about a gallon of gas. Are you as a customer allowed to complain when the car’s gas gauge is not reading “above full”, meaning topped off to the max? If not, then neither should the rental car company be complaining. Just accept “full” as full, and leave it at that.
2. Pressure car companies to make more accurate fuel gauges. The rental car companies could have some influence on the car companies with regards to this issue — they could ask that their fleet have more accurate gauges installed.
3. Add more accurate secondary fuel gauges to the tank, which can communicate wirelessly with the rental company when you return the car. This seems like an expensive option per vehicle just to track the usage of small amounts of gas.
4. Have a gas station with competitive pricing at the rental car return location, and fill the car up at the return location, with tire spikes to prevent someone from driving the car off the lot after filling up (most large return locations already use those tire spikes). The actual cost of filling the tank at the return location would be the only cost added, with no other surcharges. It would be convenient and avoid the customer having to hunt for a gas station near the return location — just pull up and fill up before return. This is clearly practical at airports with lots of rental car companies, but would not work for small independent offices scattered about the suburbs.
At a minimum, common sense says that if you’ve driven the car more than 50 miles, as indicated by the odometer, and the fuel gauge still says “full”, then you’ve filled it, receipt or not receipt. They should not be asking for a receipt if the odometer shows over 50 miles of usage. Dollar / Thrifty needs to change their policy to not require receipts if the mileage is over 50 miles.
As for some reports that the companies are concerned that people are putting water or other chemicals into the tanks to fill them up — that is something that would be easily traceable to the renter and which requiring a receipt does not address. Speaking of which, my last Dollar rental car did not have a locked gas tank, meaning someone could easily siphon out the gas and/or sabotage the vehicle by adding water, leaving me with the bill.