Is ExpressToll the worst toll company in America?

Let me start by saying that Ashley was great. Ashley is a customer service representative with ExpressToll, which operates toll roads in Colorado, and when I was having difficulty opening an account with them, Ashley patiently helped me on the phone. Thank you, Ashley.

Sadly, Ashley is pretty much the only part of ExpressToll I can praise. Otherwise, over the last month, I have found ExpressToll to be a disaster of a business. 

I'm not alone. On Yelp, ExpressToll has earned a miserable 1.3 rating out of 5 (there's also a separate page with a 1.7 rating for ExpressToll Customer Service). 

Some of the reviews:  

"Such a horrible company." (Pat S.)

"If I could give them negative stars I would." (Mike H.)

"Possibly the worst service on planet earth. I hate them so much." (Jacquelynn L.)

You might wonder what a toll agency could be doing that is so wrong. After all, this seems like a pretty straightforward business: People drive on the toll roads, you bill them for it, they pay. Simple transactions. 

Yet somehow ExpressToll frustrates customers at almost every turn. 

I was preparing for a trip where I would be renting a car at Denver International Airport. Checking my planned route, I saw that I would be using the toll roads operated by ExpressToll. 

Using a rental car on a toll road adds a small complication. Since modern tolls are assessed based on license plates and billed to the vehicle's registered owner, the invoice will go by default to the rental company, not the renter. The rental company will, in turn, bill the renter — and add an extra fee that is often ridiculously high. 

I don't mind paying tolls, but if I can avoid the added fees by rental car companies, I will.

Many customer-friendly toll agencies offer one-time payment options where rental car drivers can pay  by going online and entering a payment method within 48 or 72 hours of using the toll road. Some also offer "short-term license plate accounts" to pay tolls that have been recently incurred or that you expect to incur in the next 30 days. 

Alas, ExpressToll offers neither option. To register my rental car required opening a full account. OK, fine. I've opened plenty of different accounts online; how hard could this be?

On the ExpressToll website, I began the process of creating an account in the usual ways: Entering my name, address, phone number, email address, and creating a login and password. You have to accept the user agreement, of course.

Then it asks you to add a vehicle to your account. Since I was only using this account for a rental car, I tried to skip this step, but it wouldn't let me ("add at least one vehicle to continue"). With no other option, I painstakingly added my own car even though I had no plans to ever use it on Colorado roads. 

Then it said I had to put at least $35 into my account to start. So I entered a credit card number, prepared to authorize the charge, and clicked "continue." 

And then ... nothing. Nothing happened. No confirmation, no error message, no way to move forward. 

Reluctantly, I started over, enter all my personal info, the car info, and the credit card info. And again ... nothing.

"Your automated system is a total piece of crap!!!" (B.W.)

Puzzled, I called ExpressToll and was put into a hold that promised a three-minute wait. Ten minutes later, I was connected to Ashley.

As I said, Ashley was terrific. She set up my account for me, painstakingly entering all the information as I relayed it to her. It worked. I had an account. She also warned me that when using the ExpressToll site, you will often get mysterious error messages. It just meant, she explained, that I should log out and log in again. I'm glad she said something because soon I would discover that error messages on the ExpressToll site are as prevalent as Bronco fans in Denver. Like this: 

Now that I had an account, I decided I should download the ExpressToll app to make it easy to use on my trip. One problem: ExpressToll does not have an app. That's right, in 2026, a company that does many millions dollars of transactions, does not have an app to help its customers. 

So I would have to use the website. Each time you log in to the website, it sends a two-factor code to your email and you have to retrieve it and enter it. That's common, of course, but customer-friendly websites also offer a "Remember me" option so that you don't have to enter the code every time. ExpressToll does not.

If you're keeping score at home, we have a company that doesn't offer a user-friendly way to pay tolls, doesn't offer an app, has a rigid system for creating new accounts (that doesn't work anyway) and offers an error-prone website. Customer-friendly, it is not. 

"Would give these incompetents zero stars if possible. Tried to pay a toll and their third party site gave me an error and then charged my card twice and refused a refund on one of the payments." (Claire F.)

When I picked up my rental car in Denver, I carefully entered the car license plate and other details into the ExpressToll website before I hit the road.

It took some nine days after my trip before my tolls showed up in my account. The tolls were deducted from my $35 deposit, leaving me a balance of $21.65.

I then set out to close the account and get my remaining deposit returned. After all, the only reason I had created an account was for this one trip. It was over.

So I logged in to my account and looked for a way to close my account. I couldn't find one. We all know how companies like to make it hard to close an account, but there is always a way, you just have to dig for it.

But not in this case. Not only was there literally no way to close my account, nothing on the site disclosed this. I searched "close account" in the ExpressToll system and got this response: "No questions match your search."

I emailed a request to close my account. A day later I received a response: "ExpressToll accounts must be open for 6 months before being closed."

Wait a minute, what?? Surely, there must be a misunderstanding, so I called and eventually connected to a rep, who told me that my account could not be closed until six months after opening. She said this was explained in the user agreement.

OK, I said, I don't really care if you close the account or not, just refund my money. No, she said. "We can't refund your money until your account is closed and we can't close your account for six months. It's our policy."

I will be the first to acknowledge that my $21.65 is a piddling amount of money. But how is it possible that any company refuses to close your account and give back your money? How many people is ExpressToll denying refunds to? Can you imagine going to, say, your bank to close your account and being told you will have to wait six months to get your money? 

I spoke to two more "customer service" reps and was told me basically the same thing, again citing the User Agreement.

When I later looked for the User Agreement, it wasn't easy to find. Perhaps not surprisingly, the link that ExpressToll had sent me for the agreement when I created my account didn't work.

When I did locate the agreement, I found something interesting: It did not say anything about have to wait six months after account opening to get your money refunded. Nothing even remotely close to it. 

Perhaps I should be thankful I didn't have even more issues with ExpressToll. Yelp users have reported other, wide-ranging problems.

 I've started receiving weird toll bills from Express Toll months ago from the license plate of the vehicle was totalled in the car accident as of December 2024 . (Olga M.)

"I live in California and have never driven in Colorado but just got a bill for $4.65 for a toll!" (Lynda S.)

"I get an ExpressToll bill every other month. I haven't owned the car in over three Years (Scott H.)

When you add it all up, it is actually kind of impressive how many different ways ExpressToll frustrates consumers. There's an account creation process that is unable to create accounts. There's no app or one-time payment option. There's the fleet of error messages you get when logged in to your account. There's the refusal to give customers their money back. 

So is ExpressToll the worst toll company in America? Do you know of one that is worse? Leave your comments below.