Do car hire tricks drive you mad?

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.

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.

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.