When Victor Vance – a flight attendant and experienced traveler – was planning a recent trip to South Africa, he made sure to buy the maximum car rental insurance offered by Hertz.

"Theft, collision, accidents. Yeah, everything. It was the maximum coverage you could purchase," Vance recalled.

So when he and his two friends where run off a remote stretch of road and into a ditch, Vance thought he was covered. Instead, he said Hertz South Africa left him in the lurch, literally.

Vance’s ordeal started a few days into the trip, when he was forced to make a split second decision as a wrong way driver headed right at them.

“It happened so fast,” Vance said. “I mean it was either us or them. There was no way around it.”

The trio, forced off the road, landed in a drainage ditch and slammed into a mud embankment. They narrowly avoided a head-on collision, but not injuries.

One friend, Teresa Flores, was pinned in the backseat.

"I couldn't get out of the car. I couldn't move, I couldn't barely breathe," Flores said.

While waiting for an ambulance, Vance started dialing Hertz for help. As he dialed, a tow truck showed up at the scene.

“I asked if they were from Hertz and they said yes,” Vance told NBC 5 Responds.

Vance signed the car over to the tow truck driver and met up with Teresa at the hospital, where he kept calling Hertz South Africa to ask for another car. Ten calls in all – he said -- all of them unanswered. The friends then found themselves stranded in a foreign country, with no car and no help. They eventually made it back on their own dime. And because they’d purchased maximum collision insurance, they were not worried about the damage to the car. That soon changed when they returned home.

“When I got home, there were a strange array of charges on my credit card,” Vance said. “I mean one was for like $39, another was for like $175, and one was for $731. And they lasted for two weeks. Like every couple days just unexplained charges kept popping up on my credit card.”

The random charges totaled $1,900 in all. When Vance called Hertz for an explanation, he said he couldn’t get answers.

"They just washed their hands of me," Vance said.

That’s when he called NBC 5 Responds.

Hertz South Africa in turn pointed to its policy, which says a single car crash where “no other vehicle, person, animal or object is involved” is not eligible for its coverage. After our calls, the car rental company did refund Vance one of the steepest fees – $1,000 -- for the tow truck it said it did not send. Hertz said Vance is still on the hook for $900, and stood by its policy that one-car accidents are not covered, explaining to NBC 5 Responds that hitting an embankment does not count as hitting an “object.” The company apologized for any confusion its policy caused for Vance and his friends.