So for some reason I follow Avis on Facebook, and over the weekend my news feed popped up with the following official statement from Avis
On Friday, a customer seeking to rent a car from Avis Car Rental was not allowed to do so because he failed to provide the required documentation. Visitors to the U.S. From other countries must provide both a valid drivers license from their country of residence as well as a valid International Drivers License or passport in order to rent from Avis. We are aggressively investigating the customer’s allegations regarding the handling of this matter, as we do not tolerate any form of discrimination. So far, our ongoing investigation suggests that this customer is unfairly maligning us with unfounded accusations.
This was the first I had heard anything about it, so I googled for it, and found the following story, off of Observer.com
It appears that Dov Bergwerk, an Israeli national, tried to rent a car from Avis in New York City. Despite the fact that Mr. Bergwerk has an Avis Wizard number and has rented multiple times from Avis over the course of the years, including renting a car from that same office two days earlier, the Avis agents would not rent him a car. The reports I’ve seen cited various reasons, both from not accepting his Israeli driver’s license / passport or also due to Mr. Bergwerk’s attitude
At this point, I think it’s still unclear to me what exactly happened, though Avis’s response seems oddly worded
My experiences with Avis
Personally I haven’t had negative experiences with Avis branches (yet?), although of course I am not Jewish. I did have a strange occurrence where Avis kept trying to change the price on me when I added my wizard number (I eventually got it figured out)
I’m an “Avis First” member, which I got for free
(SEE ALSO: Getting top rental car status (for free!))
which has been useful at least for skipping the lines at some airport locations
I’m interested to hear what actually happened at Avis in this case, though I doubt we ever will. What about you? Ever had any problems with Avis?
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I would guess the truth will lie somewhere in between the two stories. The guy probably behaved badly and the Avis employee may have been bigoted. However I think more likely the employee was just incompetent. Avis may have a problem though since discrimination on the basis of national origin is not excused merely because an employee is stupid.
So many are doing the dirty work of Obama and democrats against those who are not Muslims or gays. But when did he care about gays? the places where gays are actually mistreated are Iran and the muslim nations where they throw someone suspected of being gays off from cliffs, stones to death and jails for life. He has never stood for truth!
WTF? Huh?
I don’t understand your comment, nor how it applies to this online article. Please stop randomly spewing thoughts that aren’t related at all to what we are reading.
Thanks!
I, for one, blame the cheeseburger lobby.
Well, it looks like the customer was in the right, after all.
http://nypost.com/2015/11/27/avis-idiotic-anti-israel-policy/
Thanks for sharing that followup!
Avis has purposely raised there credit check so that Minorities who are most likely struggling with this economic upheaval could not qualify to rent a car.
Even though the person who is trying to rent was there a long time client who used to rent a car from the same location for sam times twice a week. and he all ways made sure he rented the car with full insurance coverage.,, and all ways took care of their cars very carefully.
They need to rent their cars if the client is going to put full coverage on the vehicle at the time of renting the car. provided he is over 25 and he has a debit card with enough deposits.