Rental car company said they were putting a hold but charged instead. Should I file a complaint?

The same thing happened to me when I rented a car in England and declined the Collision Damage insurance. (The rental agency did not believe that my credit card provided collision insurance).

Assuming that they’re honest and credit you with the money when you return the car, there are still three annoyances that you’ll have to deal with. One is that this may push you close to your credit limit. The second is that the rental may cross card billing cycles, so you’ll have to pay credit card interest.

The third is arbitrage. Let’s say they charge you 22000 Turkish lira. That will show up as a $1150 charge on your card. Two weeks later you return the car and the rental company returns your entire deposit of 22000 lira. But the exchange rate may have fluctuated, and that 22000 might be worth $1200 ☺️ or $1100 ☹️. When I was in England, the pound increased in value by enough to cover the full cost of my rental, but it can easily work the other way.

Assuming this is not causing you problems for lack of available credit and that you don’t carry a balance month-to-month on this card (and, thus, are not paying interest on it,) I would recommend just completing the rental as normal. If they don’t refund the difference back to the expected charge within a few days of returning the vehicle, then file a dispute with your bank. For U.S.-issued cards, you have a minimum of 60 days from the time you receive your credit card statement on which a charge appears to dispute that charge. This is a legal requirement under the Fair Credit Billing Act.

So, assuming your rental is not for an especially long period, you should have plenty of time to wait until a few days after returning the vehicle to make sure that the final charges to your card are correct before you would need to file a dispute with your bank. Even if your card statement closes during the rental, the charge would appear in your amount owed on the statement, but, once the refund posts, it would normally count as a "payment" towards the outstanding statement balance, so you would not need to actually pay it from your bank account.

Granted, this becomes more problematic if you carry a balance on this card (in which case you’d potentially be paying interest.) In that case, you may want to contact your bank sooner in order to see if they can waive the interest on the amount you were not expecting.

If the problem is just a matter of lack of available credit due to the charge, there’s not likely to be much you can do about that. You would generally have the same lack of available credit even if it were just an authorization and not an actual charge. This is why authorizations exist in the first place – to make sure there’s enough credit available to clear the charge later.

(By the way, the last couple of paragraphs aren’t intended to assume anything about your situation. They’re just there to cover all of the possibilities and, even if not relevant to your case, may be relevant to others who find and read the question later.)

This is totally normal for how car rentals work. A "hold" in the sense of an authorization generally has some time limit that’s potentially shorter than the rental period, and for which the failure mode would be the rental company not getting paid at all. They are not going to do this. Authorizations are for in-process purchases like pumping gas at a gas station or checking out at a restaurant, where the sale is already in progress but you don’t yet know the total (until it’s pumped or until the customer selects a tip amount, etc.). They’re not for car rentals.

Every rental car company I’ve used (in my case, in the US) that charges a "hold" (really, a combined payment plus deposit) does so by completing the transaction for the total hold amount immediately, then refunding the deposit part when you return the vehicle. This is completely normal. They just don’t expect customers to be wise guys who understand and nitpick about the details of how credit card transactions work. Maybe they "should have" explained it better to you, or maybe you "should have" asked for details how it would appear on your account before checking out. In any case it doesn’t matter. It’s a credit card not a debit card (they insisted on credit, right?) so for functional purposes like when you can use your money, it behaves exactly as they told you it would, as a hold.