Pay Tolls Directly When Renting A Car, Or Face Modest Yet Annoying Fees

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Last year, I rented a car while mine was off having damage fixed. The danger in renting a car and then going about your normal routine is that you may forget that the rental car doesn’t have a toll transponder, and breeze through the EZPass lane as you normally would. I knew what was coming: a $25 bill for my 60¢ toll. Reader Allen didn’t know, and had to pay $35 for a $1 toll. Let these experiences serve as cautionary tales.

The good news is that you aren’t going to be hit with a substantial fine for zooming through an automated toll gate without paying. The booths instead charge the toll to the registered owner of the vehicle, or some rental companies will rent you the necessary local transponder. Either way, you’re going to pay an “administrative fee” for the service.

Allen, for example, drove through a toll gate, but didn’t know that by using this toll service he would then activate PlatePass for his entire Hertz rental period. “I learned, much to my dismay, that Hertz now uses a service called PlatePass that will charge you a fee for each day in which you rent a car, even if you only use the service once,” he grumbled to Consumerist.

Yes, even though he only used toll roads on one day of his rental, the daily service fee applied to each day that he had the car.

Compared to the total bill when you rent a car, being charged $4.95 per day plus actual tolls isn’t so bad. Yet it’s frustrating to receive a bill for something that could have been prevented if you only had a dollar handy, or hadn’t chosen the automated lane out of habit.

SEE ALSO:
Watch Out For Car Rental Companies’ Convenient Service To Pay Tolls
Hertz Alienates Longtime Customer With $10 Convenience Fee For 75 Cent Toll

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist