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The "Traveler Troubleshooter" at the Philadelphia Inquirer recently took on the issue of the added fee charged by the Enterprise rental car company for an additional driver who is not a spouse. The reader's letter begins with this:
Question: "A couple of weeks ago, my family and I took a trip to Hilton Head Island. We booked a rental car with Enterprise, and the fine print in the contract said there would be an additional charge of $5 a day for 'each additional authorized driver other than a spouse or domestic partner.'
"I checked this language specifically because my partner and I are partners, not spouses. We live in Canada (though we're U.S. citizens) and are "common-law spouses" (a domestic-partnership category) under Canadian law.
"When we arrived to pick up the car at the Savannah, Ga., airport, we were told we had to pay the extra fee because we were not married." [Note: You can read the entire letter here.]
I am happy to report that Mr. Troubleshooter (Christopher Elliott, ombudsman for the National Geographic Traveler magazine) calls this what it is: discrimination. Below are some excerpts from his answer. [You can read his full answer here.]
"By Enterprise's logic, a married couple or a same-sex couple is less of a risk to a rental car than an opposite-sex couple, or just two friends. I haven't seen any evidence that married couples are any less likely to total a car than unmarried couples.
"Enterprise is hardly the only car-rental company to charge extra-driver fees. But what makes its charges so troubling is the discriminatory nature of the fees...If Enterprise wants to charge an extra $5 per driver, it should do it for everyone."
How's this for a happy ending? Again, from the Troubleshooter:
"I contacted Enterprise on your behalf, and it refunded the extra-driver fee."
[Thanks to Carol Kahn, almost-PhD, for the heads-up about this story. I've never met Carol, but I am in touch with her because she is writing a wonderful dissertation on singles and attachment at Drexel University, and I am a long-distance member of her dissertation committee.]
