I think you should be able to shorten a reservation that's in progress. We reserved a car for a full 24 hours, since we were going to need it for enough hours such that the daily rate would kick in from the hourly rate.

Now that we're done with the car, we'd like to free up the car by shortening the reservation. We know the car is already paid for, but as a courtesy to our fellow drivers and to zipcar we thought it would be nice to make the car available. Under the current policy, we can't shorten our reservation without incurring a penalty.

Now, the car is sitting unused. We're done with it, and nobody else can use it until the end of our reserved time...

-- Anonymous, November 10, 2004

Answers

I've been in the same situation before -- reserved the car for the whole day, but found that I was done with it several hours early. It isn't that you expect to get a refund for the unused time, but getting hit with a *penalty* for trying to be a "good citizen" and free up the car for another user seems like a dumb idea to me.

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2004

I've seen this point brought up several times. Seems to make perfect sense to me! Especially on the weekends when there are a lot of us hoping that a car comes free, even for just a few hours!!

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2004