AVIS Car Rental - take the insurance or pay through your neck!

I hired a vehicle from Avis Pretoria (Francis Baard Street) on 18 February 2019 and returned it on 15 March 2019. It was pointed out to me that there was a stone chip on the windscreen. I acknowledged that it had happened while I was using the vehicle. I was informed that as I had not taken any insurance, the cost to repair would be for my account. I felt that a stone chip repair might not be too much of a problem. A few weeks later, my account was debited with R3, 457.40 for a windscreen replacement. I queried this and requested some evidence from the Customer Care. They sent me a copy of the invoice, but promised (Sharmine) to get back to me on the evidence for the replacement. A few weeks passed and no-one got back. I did not want to go through the Customer Care center again, so I drove to the Pretoria office and requested the evidence. After much searching a document for internal use only was displayed to me on a monitor which showed that a windscreen had been replaced. I suppose everything was above board, but I had to cough up almost R3,500.00 which nowadays, under the economic circumstances is very hard. Just leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.