Video Shows Woman at Avis Counter Refusing Rental Car to Customer Who Spoke Spanish

May 4, 2016
8:40 AM

UPDATE, June 3, 2016: Avis responded with an official statement.

The customer saga that Kayra M. Colón had with Avis this weekend was made public when Colon shared a public May 1 video post on Facebook:

Twenty minutes after that video was posted, Colón posted this one:

At one point in that second video, after Colón starts talking in Spanish with the man she was with, the woman at the Avis counter said, “That’s fine. I do understand some Spanish. You know, what you do is rude.”

When Colón asked the Avis woman exactly what she meant by that comment, the woman appeared to have stopped conducting business with Colon.

On May 2, Colón added a longer video that apparently happened after the exchange about speaking Spanish:

When people on Facebook started asking questions about the incident, Colón did post the following on her Facebook:

Nothing has happened. We’re waiting for corporate to contact us. They said it would be about 2-3 days. The sheriff came in and said the situation would fall under a federal law and could not even write up a report. The lady ultimately got her way and refused to rent us the vehicle.

We tweeted out Avis this morning to see if they are aware of these videos:

We haven’t gotten a response from Avis, but Avis’ Twitter profile did tweet this out this morning:

Around 11:45amET, we got this tweet from Avis: