Woman charged $8,000 after company claimed she drove nearly the distance of the Earth's circumference in three days

A woman in Canada was given one hell of a shock when she checked her bill after renting a car.

Giovanna Boniface, from Vancouver, told CTV News Toronto she rented a GMC Yukon Denali from Avis for three days earlier this month, driving between downtown Toronto, the airport and Kitchener, where she visited her mother-in-law.

Altogether, she'd covered about 300km when she returned the vehicle to the airport, before checking in for a flight to Paris.

However, Avis charged her as though she'd travelled more than 100 times as far.

In fact, they charged her as though she'd spent the three days travelling nearly the distance of the Earth's circumference.

CTV News Toronto

Giovanna said she'd prepaid $1,000 for the car, but when she checked her online banking while waiting to board her eyebrows must have risen to the top of her head.

"That's when I notice this charge for over $8,000 from Avis," she said.

The receipt indicated that she'd been billed for driving 36,482 kilometres at a rate of 25 cents per kilometre.

According to Giovanna's calculations, she would have had to drive for 72 hours straight at approximately 500 km/h for this to be possible.

You'd think with such a glaring error you'd be promptly refunded and profusely apologised to; however, Giovanna said the response from Avis was 'frustrating'.

"The first thing I wanted to do was actually go back through security and just walk to the counter," she said. "But I wouldn’t have had time to do that because the security lines were really long."

Instead, she opted to continually ring the Avis at the airport, but she couldn't get through.

"It was just ringing and ringing and no one was answering," she said. "It was really frustrating just trying to get to somebody."

She eventually managed to get through via the general number, but said she was cut off twice while trying to speak to a manager and ultimately had to board her flight $8,000 light.

"They didn't seem to really get what my issue was and I really needed them to remove this $8,000 charge," she said.

After touching down in France, Giovanna tried to get Visa to sort it, but the company was unable to assist as the charge was still pending.

It wasn't until two days later that she finally got a call from Avis, informing her the money would be refunded.

david pearson / Alamy Stock Photo

A spokesperson for Avis told CTV News Toronto that an apology and a refund had been issued, but the company didn't confirm the cause of the error. UNILAD has reached out for further comment.

As for Giovanna, she's been left less than unimpressed by the handling of the error, which added extra stress to her travels.

"Overall, it was not good customer service," she said.

"The most frustrating thing was not getting through to customer service in any kind of timely way."

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