Some of the charges you hate to see on a car rental bill if you are not aware of the terminology used by the counter sales represntatives are additional driver
Ed Perkins writes in San francisco chronicle about the “Devil is in the details of car-rental contract”…If you’ve ever rented a car, you’ve undoubtedly been as frustrated as I have at how hard it is to find an accurate comparison among the various rental companies. Base rates can be tricky enough, but you also find inconsistencies in some important extra costs and conditions. The situation is so chaotic that I can’t formulate any good “fits all” suggestions, but at least I can warn you to check into two details you might not have considered.
– Extra drivers: Often, on a rental, you’ll want someone else in your travel party to take a turn behind the wheel. If you do, that little luxury can add as much as $10 a day to your rental bill. Rental companies, in general, recognize two different kinds of extra drivers: the “automatic authorized driver” and the “additional authorized driver.”
That seems pretty clear. But different rental companies have very different definitions of which relationships qualify for automatic status — and even within one company you might find location-to-location differences. Hertz, for example, includes other employees of your company (if you’re booked at a corporate rate with your company’s ID); it also includes your spouse or civil-union partner in some states but not in others. And it includes your spouse if you belong to AAA, AARP or USAA and rent at that organization’s special rate. At the opposite end of the scale, Dollar (at St. Louis) accepts no automatic authorized drivers, charging every additional driver $10 a day.