‘Ants everywhere.’ Georgia rental car infestation prompts woman to cancel SC reservation
In a normal year, getting a rental car might be refreshing. They are often pristine, fully gassed up and lacking in maintenance problems.
But this year is not a normal year for anything, much less rental cars. And Brooke Smallwood’s recent rental from Avis was anything but normal, or refreshing.
That’s because the White Toyota Highlander she rented for her family was infested with ants, as was the second car she picked up, a Black GMC Acadia.
Yes, ants. The tiny insects of the nightmares of any child who has ever fallen on a playground and ended up landing on an ant mound.
Smallwood was visiting Augusta, Georgia, for the Nike Peach Jam basketball competition that her 10-year-old son was participating in. A frequent traveler, she was prepared and breezed through the airport on July 15 with her husband and two children. There was a long wait at the rental car line, 45 minutes to an hour, she said, but eventually she picked up her first rental car and headed to California Dreaming for lunch.
“My daughter was getting out the car, and both my kids just start screaming,” said Smallwood, who lives in the Washington D.C. area. “We go over to see what’s happening. All we saw was ants everywhere, all over the door, inside the car, outside the car. I mean, just everywhere.”
Smallwood said she hadn’t noticed the ants when they were first getting into the car.
“You’re busy putting things in the car, and you’re not focused — you’re not even looking. I mean, we would never, ever suspected anything like that happening,” she said.
Smallwood and her husband immediately took video of the ants, almost unable to believe that it was happening.
“For us to be able to jump out of the car screaming and still capture that much activity, you can imagine just how inundated that car was,” she said, adding that her daughter was covered in welts from dozens of ant bites.
She called for roadside assistance to have the car towed back to the airport. But she found out she would have to wait several hours for a tow and that she wasn’t allowed to leave the car while she waited. The ensuing drama took up much of the rest of the day.
Eventually, her family made it back to the airport and picked up a new car, a Black GMC Acadia. They headed to their hotel. The ant ordeal took up most of their first day in Augusta, scuttling any plans for sightseeing before the basketball competition.
Smallwood said she paid $1,200 for the new rental, including a $50 per day upgrade fee for getting a larger SUV. After battling through Avis’ phone system for two days, she said she managed to reach a customer service agent with Avis on July 17. The company took one day of the rental off the total cost as well as the upgrade fee, lowering the cost of her rental by more than half, to $429, according to emails with the company Smallwood shared. Avis also offered her a discount for her next rental.
But later that afternoon, Smallwood discovered that her new rental was also infested with ants. At first, she wondered if the ants might have been a carryover from the first car.
Upon inspection, Smallwood found dirt and food crumbs up under the seats of the car. She said it looked like the car hadn’t been cleaned in weeks.
“It takes more than just not cleaning up one person to create a situation where you’re infested with bugs,” she said.
A representative for Avis Budget Group said Smallwood’s situation was “resolved to their satisfaction” on July 21, four days after Smallwood first got through to the company.
However, Smallwood is still unhappy with the company and believes she should get a full refund for the rental. She had planned to rent another car from Avis for a vacation in Myrtle Beach the following week but decided to cancel the reservation out of frustration. Instead, she used Uber for her entire vacation in the Grand Strand.
This isn’t the first time Avis Budget Group customers have reported picking up a dirty rental car. Patricia Wall Erbe, when visiting Myrtle Beach in June, said the car she picked up was “filthy” and had “dried white stuff on the driver’s seat.
When asked for comment on both situations, Avis would not give specifics about what changes will be made to ensure that its cars are clean, as the problem now stretches across multiple locations and is not isolated to Myrtle Beach. The company said it has not received additional reports of unclean cars.
Smallwood said she wished that Avis had just made her wait longer, allowing for more time to properly clean her car, rather than hand her one that was dirty.
“That is something they can control,” she said. “If they just said, ‘Hey, you need to wait an hour because we need to clean your car,’ we would go over to a restaurant and come back in an hour. That’s fine. Don’t just hand out dirty cars.”
However, Smallwood said she believes Avis might have a systemic problem right now, fueled by extremely high demand from vacation travelers paired with the nationwide shortage of cars. The company, however, has not indicated this is the case.
“This is much deeper than just a one-off,” Smallwood said.
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "‘Ants everywhere.’ Georgia rental car infestation prompts woman to cancel SC reservation."
