Turo Requires a Driver's License Number and Credit Card to Show Full Price
I know they're simply following Airbnb's model of showing only the daily price, then tacking on extra fees at checkout, but it's hostile to the customer.
When the minimum final cost is 50% more than the list price, I suppose deception is the best way to drive signups.
Ironically, I may have been more likely to complete my purchase had I seen true numbers from the start. The initial fee had me thinking it was remarkably affordable.
135 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI agree with your sentiment - if the app shared the service fee prior to the final step of the booking flow, I may have still reserved the car. Even at a total of $100.80, the price was still less than other nearby options.
There are some legitimate uses for formula pricing, e.g., rent a U-Haul with a per-mile cost, or a cell phone bill with a per GB data cost, or a per-user SAAS model.
I imagine a dark pattern for the "resort fee" might be a complicated formula described in words in size 6 font at the bottom of the page if you took the time to read the footnote.
It doesn't take a world-leading regulator to say "it is an unfair and deceptive business practice not to list the total price in a search result."
I think a regulator may be able to handle this one.
[1] https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer...
[edit to include text:]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Airfares_Act_of_20...[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/41712
[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/399.84
https://www.adlawaccess.com/2022/02/articles/dark-patterns-a...
Marriott has settled a lawsuit over similar pricing "dark patterns": https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Hotel-News/Marriott...
> Among other provisions, the agreement requires Marriott to prominently disclose the total price of a hotel stay, including room rate and all other mandatory fees, on the first page of its booking website as part of the total room rate.
Seems to mainly be a matter of enforcement, it's probably worth contacting your state AG with something deceptive like this. Hard to expect them to take action on something they don't know about!
If you ever get a Marriott that tries to add fees that you didn't expect, call up corporate Marriott and complain about a violation of their legal settlement regarding hidden fees. They will absolutely lay the hammer down on the hotel and you'll end up with credits far in excess of the attempted hidden fee ;)
Or, in this case, his/her campaign contributions.
Specially because in EU all the prices shown in stores/everywhere is the final price, with VAT, service, tip, etc, etc...
Some companies (eg. Alternate) have different websites for consumers and business customers, other companies (eg. Conrad) allow you to toggle between pricing modes (with tax or without).
The price is usually shown without shipping, but there's usually a little button "calculate shipping prices" where you can type your zip code and then they show the shipping prices.
There is no excuse but sleezy marketing to not show what something costs.
I'd go far even to make sure every price sticker is regulated and should include final sales price. That means, all taxes, all tips, everything. There is only one problem I see – sales taxes are state dependent so it puts a lot of burden on ecommerce/online stores to 1) Determine where the customer is from 2) Have a database of sales taxes for all states. But it can be done, I am sure.
Tips should be made illegal and employers should fairly compensate their workers.
That's about as dystopian as possible. Telling people that they cannot just hand money to other people might be the end of the entire concept of charity.
In America, we have a situation where I’ve seen waiters put on a facade of niceness which is so fake, and if you don’t tip, you’re an asshole. This implicit guilt needs to be made uncool.
I tried tipping room maker in a Hotel in Japan and they promptly refused and handed me the cash.
It's a bit of a dark pattern. First it makes you actively say "No I don't want to tip for this" and then I gurantee plenty of people have that nagging thought in the back of their head that the food they get may be different depending on if they tip. After all, the tip is before you get anything.
I always tip, generously, for delivered food or table service. But I don't tip for an employee to simply hand me a carry-out order.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
Let alone - tips are very often not "optional"
Tips are literally a variable price co-pay for a service.
Not only can it be done, it is done. Companies don't have to brew up their own sales tax calculators, there are providers of that. Just enter the address, get the tax rate.
Of course it can be done, because they are already doing it in the final checkout. They just need to reveal the number earlier in the process. If they have to ask for a location to do that, just say so --- e.g. "We need your zip code to show you the final price including tax"
In reality they settled the suit and then told the Pennsylvania AG to eat shit, they still hide the fees but now there is at least a checkbox to show the fees included.
One of the funnier things about scammy pricing schemes and American misunderstanding of laws. Ask anyone in the country if they are aware of “false advertising” and they’ll probably tell you it’s a pretty serious crime when in reality companies are pretty much only encumbered by civil law and even then they can avoid responsibility by playing a shell game, a la Johnson & Johnson’s sham bankruptcy, while criminal statutes are pretty much just for poor people.
But fees are many times also used to avoid or evade taxes and royalties. For example, resort fees can be used by hotels to avoid paying royalties to the franchisor.
There is never any good excuse to hide or gatekeep the total price from a customer though.
But there's no "bedsheets" analog for a car rental. Yes, it needs to be washed, but I imagine most renters of Priuses don't actually care if the car hasn't been washed in a few days/weeks.
That's certainly one reason. But it can also make sense to have a one-time fee that's independent of the duration of the rental. Cleaning a room is the most obvious example. But there are other more or less fixed overheads that are largely independent of the length of time something is rented.
If you're renting out just about anything, would you prefer seven 1-day rentals or a one week rental?
Consider the amount of work involved for the owner in renting one car to 30 people each for one day and one car to one person for 30 days and you'll see the difference.
Nope. The rest of this sentence doesn't even matter: if someone needs to do something, that's a reason to charge for it, but not a reason to hide the price.
I was looking at renting a car in LA for a day and the service fee was the same price as renting the car, across most of the cars. If I changed the query to be a two day rental, then the service fee dropped to 1/10th the 1day price.
In a Different city, though, even the 1 day rental doesn't have such a large fee.
In my area you can "find" multiple Chrysler 300Cs for rent for $600/day. I say "find" because many of them are unavailable for days or even weeks on end as being rented.
Good scam if you're, say, a dealer. Have one of your customers "rent" your car through Turo at an inflated rate. Bonus: you don't even have to let them have your car. They're just paying you and saying they rented it.
I don't understand what's unique about doing it through Turo.
If you have some other eComm platform telling T-shirts or whatever, sure there could be fake orders but it wouldn't be all that hard to track down that these THINGS were never sent/made. But anything involving a service...well, it's much harder to prove that those things DIDN'T happen.
It’s also tough to verify an actual transaction happened. With most e-commerce, the equivalent would involve shipping around boxes of rocks to generate tracking numbers.
I'm a big Turo user (love renting sports cars off there for weekend corner carving), but I forget if it's required.
A huge barrier to wide adoption of BEVs is because dealers won't sell them because BEVs have far lower vehicle service requirements (no oil changes, no 20,000mi servicing, etc) which are normally half their revenue stream. Car dealers, en-masse, are happy to see the world burn than do-their-part and transition the world away from fossil-fuel cars simply due to their bottom-line.
Beth has dirty money. Bob, a friend of Beth’s, “rents” her car. (There is no car. Maybe Bob pays Beth over Turo and then Beth gives Bob the dirty cash.) Beth now has the appearance of legitimate income.
It still seems risky for those involved because there is a paper trail linking the buyer and seller in the case the buyer gets busted.
This is a layering mechanism, designed to obfuscate and distribute dirty cash. There may be many Bobs. Or Bob may be fine running cash to Mexico whereas Beth is not; this lets Bob sell that service to Beth.
(I’m also not sure how much Turo requires rentals be settled through its platform. If it allows off-platform billing and settling, there is no need to reimburse with dirty cash.)
Or Bob knows people who know what to do with suitcases full of $500 Euro notes without alerting legal issues.
Presumably Beth pays Bob for this service.
Then Bob may have to pay his friends.
This can be done with varying degrees of sophistication.
Bob just happens to have the Cayman Islands as the business location.
Money flows from U.S. business as a deductible expense, to the location out of the IRS's reach.
Or there isn't one Beth but lots of people with dodgy credit cards from banks in weird places. Those card holders indeed get their money in suitcases full of folding money, pay for their "rentals" and so the money flows into legitimate commerce. Bob of course pays for this.
Does Beth have cash? Is it in a bank account? You can't use cash on Turo from what I understand. If money is in bank account, it won't be "dirty". So, how can Beth pay for a rental on Turo?
As someone already commented, there is nothing special about Turo, you could just set up an ecommerce store and ship rocks around.
Can you please expand?
Your analogy is correct. These serve similar functions. It’s just easier to pretend to rent a car than it is to ship rocks. (I disagree with OP about there being massive money laundering on Turo.)
1) How is it "dirty" money when it is in the bank account? It is accounted for. Your tax ID / EIN is associated with the bank account and it is reported to IRS.
2) The ecommerce rock-shipping company would need to take cash and have to deposit in a checking account to be able to successfully launder money. So at this point, it cannot be an "ecommerce" company. It would need to be a hot-dog stand. Right?
Lots of dirty Russian money in bank accounts looking for invoices to launder against.
The idea of money laundering is to turn cash into legal income. There’s other kinds of money laundering too including cross-border type transactions like you might see with art or collectibles but it’s hard to see how this makes much sense via Turo.
If the buyer has the ability to use a credit card to spend the money without attracting attention why not just buy something they want instead?
All these others are thinking to hard. I see it on the airbnbs in the LA hills that are all fake with fake pictures etc. just there to rent to instantly launder a transaction from what I’m guessing.
Once it's a digital transaction it's a digital transaction I am not seeing the benefits here of getting Turo involved and lots of fees and costs when literally any platform will do this more easily. Like call it a car detailing service and get a square reader and only pay a couple percent.
Having used Turo in the past my theory is that there's just a bunch of people mildly delusional about what their car is worth, or maybe that found renting their car is usually not worth the hassle but will take an exorbitant rate for when the super bowl is in town or some other time every rental car option is totally sold out.
I understand when products are compared directly: Uber vs. Lyft, Uber Eats vs. Grubhub, etc. Often consumers are looking at the exact same product and purely deciding based on price. I can see what a company would add that dark pattern to squeeze every dollar they can get.
AirBnb, Turo? I don't get it, are folks comparing the purchases directly to "other" products?
Sometimes to hotels and car rental chains. But also people glance at these sites to ballpark the cost of a vacation, get their hearts set, and come back later (maybe after booking flights) and only then see the full price.
My biggest gripe with Turo, and the reason I don't use it much, is it's really inconvenient, even though you book through the app. For example, I land at SFO. With Turo turns out to get the stated rate you need to go to the car's location, which ime is usually some inconvenient neighborhood where the owner lives. SO it's kind of weird Lyfting to some neighborhood to get a car. Otherwise it's like an extra $80-150 to have the car waiting at SFO (or whatever airport). Then returning is the same ordeal.
I am a bit used to the dark pattern in the app they and places like AirBnB employ, for better or worse I'm used to it, and so never really get my hopes up until I see the final checkout price right before hitting "Reserve" (which adds friction because the fees are never the same across cars/homes). One thing that I think would make Turo viable for business travelers like me in the future would be a much more frictionless delivery process, perhaps acquiring a rental area at airports like the regular car rental companies have and not adding giant fees to avoid inconvenience. Put the onus on the person providing the car to have the car at the expected place at the expected time.
I swear they're reliant on customer good luck and ignorance. There is no way to get insurance for these, and most people think their personal insurance covers it. In fact, it's super hard to get the correct info out of your own insurance company and you have to go up a level on support before you get the bad news that if anything went wrong you're not covered and you'd be royally screwed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928349
Depending on the price of the car, they may take a 2k deposit for an accident, but that's pretty normal. It's returned to you once the car is returned.
What a weird thing to normalize given how exclusionary it is to the vast majority of the world’s population. Though I guess we are talking about car rental via a smartphone, so we’re already somewhere on the exclusionary spectrum.
Rental companies figured out the actuarial model for what they do some time ago. If Turo is hitting you with $2,000 to take the vehicle, they have no clue how to model risk and are probably arrogant about their approach compared to the staid, boring incumbents. Either that or they just don’t have enough volume to spread the risk. Or are you renting a $250k vehicle every time?
Also, if you want to see that deposit, go to any car rental place in america and offer to pay with debit card or cash and see what they'll hassle you with. Hertz requires requires a credit card. Enterprise requires proof of a returning flight. Dollar requires a credit check.
FWIW, more of the same; same as it ever was.
https://www.carscoops.com/2022/04/two-arizona-nissan-dealers...
They may have to "add" you to their insurance plan or carrier before renting you the car. That infuriating service fee might actually be personalized for your driving record.
As for the credit card, it is user-hostile at best to demand this before being able to see a price. I wish there was an easier way to complain about businesses that openly violate terms of the standard merchant agreements. Imagine a physical store requiring you to swipe a credit card before being able to enter. Amazon had to allow for customers without phones or credit cards at their "Go" stores for compliance reasons.
For variable fees, you could show a range of prices to show the minimum and maximum possible, or show the base price with an approximate or estimated additional fee.
There are LOTS of ways to be open and clear with the customer about these things without being deceptive.
Disclaimer: co-founded a P2P car sharing service in Norway that was acquired by Getaround in 2019.
I have the same feeling overall now, though. The same car had a huge bulge in its tire that they were either negligent about, or deliberately hid. And they have to take a picture of your ID to complete the handoff. The kind of people who have a fleet of fancy cars to rent out like this? Yeah, you don't want them having a picture of your ID.
I’m a repeat customer let me turn on “true price” option somewhere because it makes me want to use your products LESS.
Jfc product manager of growth how do you live with yourself.
So, yeah, I get there's some associated risk and effort, but it is probably pretty tempting for some to collect a fairly hefty rental fee on an otherwise unused or little used asset.
[1] https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/airbnb-settles-6-million-cla...
[2] https://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/eic/site/cb-bc.nsf/eng/0...
This law should really apply across the board for all purchases.