Do car hire tricks drive you mad?

I was cheated by Budget at their branch next to Burbank Airport in Los Angeles last May. I signed a document confirming my hire of a car, not knowing that it contained a sentence in its body stating that Budget would make the conversion to sterling. The first I knew of this was when I got my receipt for the return of the car. I protested immediately (the rate was highly disadvantageous) and continued to protest. I got no help or satisfactory response from Budget. Since I had handed in the car on my departure taking further action became very difficult and so Budget got away with it.

A couple of years ago I booked a car with ‘Zero Excess’. On picking up the car I was told that ‘Zero Excess’ did not cover tires or the windscreen and if I wanted to cover those there was a 60 euro additional insurance that I needed to pay.

Like many people with tired / excited children who just want to get out of the airport and on the way to the pool my ability to push-back was limited so I ended up paying for the peace of mind.

I now check insurance and fuel policies very carefully before hiring.

I rented a car on the net directly from Budget Car Rentals at Stanstead airport at a quoted cost of £88.00 for 7 days. When I got to the airport they loaded me with another charge of £100 for a full tank of petrol in case I returned the car empty (which would of course be impossible?)
They then gave me the choice of a damage waiver charge of another £38, or I had to leave a credit card deposit of £850, yes Eight Hundred and fifty pounds !!!!!!!!!!!
I had no choice because they already had my initial fee of £88, and ended up paying £226.00 for the 7 days hire. I will never go near these vultures again, and will advise my family and friends and anybody reading this to do likewise.
Budget?…………Bulls..t!

A few years ago whilst in the US, we hired a 5-year-old Crown Vic from an outfit called Rent-a-Wreck. The main benefit is that the inevitable dings/scratches will not identify you as a tourist – and the more the better!

On returning the vehicle, we were hit with an unexpected excess mileage charge, but a bit of haggling got this waived.

It was a fabulous car at a highly favourable rate, and they even paid for a punctured tyre to be repaired (which wasn’t their fault).

Beware, if using a foreign-based broker like Holiday Autos, as they may not have offices in the UK. My recent experience with this Dublin-based Car Trawler owned company, after using them successfully for many years, was only brought to a happy conclusion by the back-up provided by my card company. A surprise charge to my credit card (after return to the UK) for non-existent damage on return of the car – which had actually been signed for by the rental company at Milan airport – was not cancelled after receipt of my documented complaint. In fact, the customer relations office in Gdansk (via an Indian call centre) simply refused to discuss the detail of my complaint, or even respond to the letter that I’d sent them immediately the issue arose. I felt powerless, with nowhere to go with my appeals – quite the reverse of previous years when the UK office had always been responsive to any queries.

Argus Car Hire ran a fake 24 hour sale for a variety of foreign destinations in January 2014. I was already tracking prices for a holiday in Morocco and was content with £176 for 11 days for a Ford Ka or equivalent but, having received the mailshot saying 20% off during the 24 hour sale, I waited for sale day to book. Result? The price of £176 had been inflated to £220 and then discounted by 20% back to £176! The same applied to all the alternative suppliers that they quoted.
I booked anyway because I had lost nothing but I reported them to Trading Standards (who have done nothing presumably because Argus are registered in Ireland).
Having said the above I have used Argus several times before without problems (but of course they are only the agents).

The Hire Companies in this country are just as bad. Last June I needed to have a hire car for a week when I was waiting delivery of a new car (my current car had broken down). Europacar made a fraudulent claim for some extra non existent damage to the vehicle, which I had left with the main dealer when my new car was ready (as I had been instructed). For some inexplicable reason my insurer agreed to accept their claim! Moral of the story is I guess – TRUST NO ONE and return the vehicle to the Hire Company’s premises!

I hired a car through Hertz when on a break in Ireland. We ended up only driving the car 50 miles to my mums house and 50 miles back to the airport. It was on the driveway at my mums for 4 days. When we dropped it back to Waterford airport the man checked the car and said it was fine. I stupidly took him at his word and got on my flight. A few days later Hertz took £1600 off my credit card. I had received no letter or email from them stating why. I contacted them and they said the alloy wheel had been damaged in 2 places. The photos they eventually included showed damage that could only have been caused by kerbing it and I know for a fact that I did not do that. After confronting them over it they reduced the charge to £160! I am still annoyed however as I know I did not cause any damage. It is just a licence to print money! Beware and make sure you check everything with a fine tooth comb, take photos of everything and make sure you get the card signed off at drop off.

Would it be possible to produce a reasonable example of a suitable and fair car rental document, that listed clearly what was a reasonable contract.
When making a reservation we could attach this statement of what we wanted, If they cannot provide it we will take our business elsewhere.
We could rapidly draw the attention of the various companies to this threat to their scams if “Which ” could make a ‘download’ sample available on the net and ask members to make an inquiry for a possible booking and attach the suggested rental document.
Many failures of of possible bookings might bring some attention to their irksome scams

We recently hired a car in Melbourne, Australia, from APEX Car Rentals. They have a full to full fuel policy and offer three levels of hire: Budget, Standard and The Works. The Works includes a complete damage waiver with no excess and no strings attached over tyres etc. It also includes a SatNav, which we considered essential and was cheaper than getting maps from Garmin for our own device.
Nobody else offers this kind of package and we were highly delighted with the service and the car.
BUT – (there’s always a BUT) beware of the range allowed. Not mileage, but range. This is not stated on their web site booking form, but is made clear on a small map that is included in the hire agreement that you sign on pick-up. We were not allowed further north than Mildura on our agreement.
If this is an impotant feature for you – CHECK ON BOOKING! Send an email before you commit to booking.
TOP TIP: If you do unwittingly stray outside of the allowed area, you will not be insured, so make sure that you wipe the SatNav’s memory clean before handing back the car!

We have recently returned from Spain (Alicante airport) where we hire a car from Gold Car.
Not only were we forced into taking out additional insurance for tyres / glass but we were not given the chance to pay in Euros but were charged at a punative rate of exchange. The cost would have paid for six months comprehensive insurance of our Fiesta at home.
I tried to point out a multitude of scrapes and scratches before driving the car but was told not to bother the rep. Had I optes to leave the 600 Euro deposit I am sure that all the damage would have held to have occurred while I had the car as it would appear that they do not carry out repairs. do they just bank the premiums?
Gold Car did say that they would refund the cost of any unused fuel but the amount credited was far less than the value of the remaining fuel.
I talked to others whom had hired from other dealers who told similar tales. All hire cars now seem to come with high mileages and damaged.

We hired a car from Thrifty, to pick up at Munich airport, in Oct 2012, through a third party website. When we arrived the car rental company was TERSTAPPEN who I now know to be a Dollar Thrifty Sublicensee. There was no one to inspect the car when we returned. In Jan 2013 they took 889.90eur off my credit card for false damage. If I had told the credit card company that the card had been misused they would have paid me and Terstappen would have kept the money. My credit card company did a charge back and Terstappen withdrew the invoice. I did some research on the internet and this also happened to an American who had booked through Dollar a company he trusted. He also managed to get his money back.

I hired a car for a week in Bulgaria. When I returned the car, the hire office at the airport was closed so I posted the keys through the postbox. When I returned to uk I got a call telling me that I had not left the wallet containing insurance documents.They were correct as I did not realise they had to be returned. I offered to send them back by next day courier but this was not acceptable to them. They charged £130 for the replacement documents which was about the same price as the car hire.

My wife and I recently spent a week in Tenerife at the Roca Navaria hotel on the south west of the island , we hired a car at the hotel, garaged in the basement,we paid in cash for the hire and paid a returnable deposit in cash. They did’nt check the car when we fetched it back,we took our receipt to the office and got our deposit back no hassle , no credit cards. wonderful.

Last summer my wife and I hired a “Firefly” car at Pisa Airport.
After 14 days use but only travelling reasonably short journeys around decent roads in Tuscany when I got home I got a bill of 64 euros for washing the car!
I complained twice and had to wait about 3 months before they eventually refunded the money.
Undoubtedly this was a scam to make a quick 64 euros as the car was in pristine condition when returned – thank goodness my wife checked our Credit Card bill !!

I have full hire care insurance from my American Express Platinum Card. I can therefore decline all optional insurance that a hire car company tries to sell me and American Express’s insurers will pick up the bill for any losses from alleged damage. It’s therefore no loss to me if a hire car company tries one of these dirty tricks, but I am sure that American Express’s insurers are wise to this and would fight it vigorously.

The other scam is car seats for children. Invariably old, dirty and knackered, we’ve been quoted the same price for the car seats as for the car itself. And you can only ‘request’ them when you book, and you’re at the mercy of the rental office as to whether they’ve actually got the right size in stock. By the time you’re at the airport, it’s too late to choose someone else. Given that the car seats cost less to buy than the price that you pay to hire them, it’s morally fraud, even if it’s legal.

I was conned by Dickmanns out of £407.84p for damage I DID NOT DO! it makes me Seth, Avoid Dickmanns at all costs, they are conning people daily, and nothing is done about it.

That guy who owns Dickmanns as no morals whatsoever, I hope that he gets his just rewards for all that theft, and ends up eating porridge for a long, long time, and all of his assets be taken away as proceeds of crime!!

I am a frequent car renter and have an insurance4carhire policy so as to avoid the much higher charges companies offer. Recently I rented a car via carrentals.co.uk (whom I always use) from Green Motion at Stansted airport. At the outset we walked round the car and the (minimal) bodywork damage was noted on a form. When I returned the car I was told there was an additional small (under a centimetre in diameter) chip on the wheel arch. I wasn’t present when the car was inspected but I returned to the car to view the damage and took photos to support the first claim on my insurance4carhire policy I’ve ever made. There was indeed a tiny break in the paintwork. How it had come about I have no idea. Nothing similar has ever happened to me before, and I couldn’t help feeling I was being punished for not having taken out their excess insurance. I was toke it was probably a stone flying up from the road surface. The lessons to me are don’t allow the vehicle to be inspected without being present, and don’t rent from Green motion again.

One of the problems that I have faced by hiring a car from San Francisco airport is as a result of the Golden Gate Bridge no longer having toll booths. The toll is collected by other means, such as the “FasTrak” device fitted to vehicles, including hire cars. This is fine, but hire companies charge by the day for this facility, so that if you only use the bridge southbound once to take the car back to the airport, as I do, you pay for every day you hire the car, and not each time you need to pay a toll. This can amount to a reasonable sum, say 50 dollars for a 10 day hire, depending on the hire company. Also, it can be difficult to ascertain the charge until you reach the airport desk to collect the car.

Another unfair charge is the levy for breakdown assistance. Pressure is applied at the airport desk to take out this insurance, but my feeling is that you are paying to hire a car that works, and if it does not, for any reason, it should be the responsibility of the hire company to ensure that you get one.

As a young family with one child in an extended rear-facing car seat and usually travelling with a couple of suitcases and pushchair as well as taking our own car seats with us (hire costs for these are prohibitive and the seat quality seems to be variable at best) space in both the boot and rear seat are critical. We know that we can fit everything comfortably in a medium-sized family hatchback, but that anything smaller becomes very difficult.

Therefore, when booking a hire car, we always book a car described as a VW Golf / Vauxhall Astra / Ford Focus “or similar” as we know that pretty much anything in this class will be able to accommodate our family and luggage. However, hire car firms seem to have a very odd idea as to what constitutes ‘similar’ and on the last five rentals when arriving at the airport and proceeding to collect our hire car we have been presented with a Nissan Juke, a Hyundai ix20, a Renault Captur, a Citroen C3 Picasso and Renault Clio estate. None of these cars are in the same class as those specified at the time of booking and none is remotely similar either in terms of size or performance.

On each occasion when challenging the representative – usually in a foreign language or limited English – we have been assured that we have been given a similar car to that which we have paid for because it has been put in the same ‘group’ by the hire company. They always dig out their group lists and highlight them as proof that they haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not the poor reps’ fault, but the people higher up who are deciding what cars go in which group. They don’t seem to bare any resemblance to conventional classes of car and there seems to be no comeback to the statement that the hire company has put them in the same group so they must be comparable, even though these lists are rarely available at the time of booking.

On several occasions I have written and complained to the UK customer services once returning home, but with no greater success – they merely repeat the same arguments. I once spent half an hour on the telephone talking to a customer services person with apparently very little knowledge of individual car models and their sizes arguing that a Hyundai ix20 1.3 was in no way ‘similar’ to a VW Golf 1.6 and that whilst a Hyundai i30 would have been a valid alternative, an ix20 has more in common with a VW Polo-sized i20. But because the car hire firm put them in the same group, i must be mistaken.

When we questioned the provision of a Nissan Juke, we were told that we should be grateful as this represented an ‘upgrade’ to booked car, despite being significantly smaller in both boot space and rear seat room. We had a long argument over the Hyundai ix20 but to no avail and had to make several long journeys with luggage on the back seat which wouldn’t fit in the small boot. On the most recent occasion we spent over an hour arguing with a rep over the Renault Clio estate which he was adamant was a bigger car than a Golf, despite the fact that we couldn’t physically fit the rear facing child seat behind the driver or front passenger. Being an estate there was plenty of room in the boot, but the cabin was the same (smaller) size as a regular Clio supermini – a whole class size below the car we booked. Eventually he relented and gave us an Alfa Romeo Gulietta which he swore was smaller, even after we’d successfully loaded in all of our luggage and car seats.

All of this makes what is often an already tiring and frustrating experience only more so and there seems to be no easy way around it other than to hire the class of car bigger than we really need, incurring further expense.

We have recently returned from a 200 mile road trip around the USA. We rented our hire car from Budget at San Francisco Airport. We booked the car in March as we wanted an SUV type vehicle so the children were comfortable in the back seats.
We fought the usual battles with declining upgrades and then the. Clerk told my husband to sign the form. I queried an amount shown as it said $6.49 per day: Accepted and reiterated that we didn’t want any extras. The desk clerk was really dismissive and me me feel stupid when he said it wasn’t an extra, it was part of our hire and we would pay no extra fees for the hire but that we had to sign the form to release the car. Lo and behold, we have returned to a $120+ charge for personal accident insurance we neither wanted nor needed. Budget refuse to acknowledge any complaint and just say we signed a rental agreement. They will not refund our £62.42. I am holding out little hope that our credit card company will pay any money out either as the form was signed albeit under false pretences. I’m hoping they are successful in their chargeback though because I don’t see why they should be able to lie to and steal from people.

I must be a very lucky person as I have only ever had one problem – the hire company double billed me for fuel in Spain. They were apologetic and refunded me. I hire cars regularly all over the world(probably 10 times a year for the last 20 years) , have never paid to waiver the insurance and never had any real problems. Mind you i do always check the car carefully and am very careful what i sign, no matter how tired i am. To be honest i am very grateful that someone is their with a nice clean car and usually a smile no matter what time i arrive.

Regarding the satnav extra charge “scam”: I looked up Alamo’s (Orlando) charges and found that it’s an exorbitant $70 extra per week. EVEN WORSE, however (and I emailed Alamo to confirm this) if you opt to hire a luxury car like a Cadillac which has satnav fitted as standard equipment, I was astonished to learn that Alamo actually DISABLES the satnav on these cars, only to re-connect it on payment of the extra fee! I shall not be hiring from Alamo.

Hired a mustang at tampa airport with budget after arriving telling us the only car in the group was a shi-e vw beetle convertible talked into up grading to a stingray an extra $3000 -ucking con from the americans once again