Nice, Jalisco is on the West coast of Mexico, not much further south than Cartel territory. And dont get me wrong we had an awesome trip. Just learned a few valuable lessons is all.
But yeah, right down to the last day... scammers galore. Took the rental car back and after they inspected it told me to go in the office with the inspection paper. I noticed they had circled the driver side front wheel well...
I get inside and some French guy is absolutely furious yelling at the guy behind the counter calling him a crook an a rip off artist lol, I thought oh shit, here we go...
They said my car was damaged and it was goin to cost me extra. I said oh, thats interesting, I'm pretty sure I have pics of that from when I picked it up. Sure enough I did and showed it to them, so she says wait here and goes back outside. 5 mins later she comes back in and says yes that damage was there but there is more, right in front of the damaged wheel well there are deep scratches in the lower quarter panel.
I couldnt believe it. I said are you serious? You dont think that happened at the same time? It's clearly what caused the wheel well to come apart. She said no way, the scratches were fresh and new. So i pulled my pics back out, zoomed in and showed her the scratches were visible in the pics i had taken when we picked it up.
THEN she says, "well you could have just taken those pics last night" with this cocky grin on her face. I laughed and said yeah I dont think so. The photo has a date stamp on it.. Showed it to her, she got the manager out and we showed him the pics with the date stamp and they begrudgingly agreed the damage was already there when I picked it up and they fully refunded my deposit. But damn if they didnt try to screw me...
Stuff like that really took a lot of the "fun" out of the trip. This pic right here saved me a few hundred dollars or more.. And you cant tell me they didnt know about it before. I told them as much and called them a pathetic bunch of thieves when I walked out lol.
Felt pretty good about having my ass covered. I only took so many pics of the car because I read in a travel blog that they are notorious for scams like this and you should clearly document every single scratch when you pick it up. Glad I did. I almost missed those damn scratches... You can just barely see them on the lower left corner of the pic.
View attachment 943904