SPAIN’S government has fined car rental company Avis €1 million for ‘abusive practices’ over customer charges.
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs said renters had to pay extra administration fees if they were fined for a traffic offence.
It said the maximum penalty was handed down after concluding the charges were abusive under consumer protection laws.
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Avis imposed an extra fee ranging between €33 and €45 to clients who committed a traffic offence while renting a vehicle from them.
When a hire car in Spain receives a traffic fine, the rental company is required to provide authorities with details identifying the person who had rented and driven the vehicle.
Avis charged customers an additional fee for processing the fine and providing the authorities with the identity of the person responsible.
The Consumer Affairs Ministry stated that identifying the driver is already a legal obligation of the vehicle owner and therefore customers should not be charged an additional fee simply for the company carrying out that obligation.
The Traffic and Road Safety Law states that the registered owner of a vehicle is legally required to identify the person responsible for an offence.
For car hire companies, this means providing the authorities with the renter’s identity or, where appropriate, the rental agreement.
The Ministry said that the contractual clause used by Avis violated several sections of the General Law for the Protection of Consumers and Users.
According to the ruling, the fee effectively required customers to
pay for something that Avis was legally obliged to do anyway and imposed a disproportionate financial burden on the consumer.
The practice was classified as a ‘very serious infringement’, partly because a court had previously ruled against the same type of levy.
In 2020, a Basque Country judge declared several general conditions used by Avis to be unfair, including its administration fee for handling traffic fines.
Avis was ordered to remove the clauses, stop applying them to existing contracts and refrain from including them in future agreements.
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