DECEPTIVE PRACTICES
Complaint
Keith Dooley
Country: United States
I rented a car from carrentals.com. The quoted price from Thrifty was $114.00 including tax and surcharges. When I got to the counter I was told that the actual price was $206.00. I was absolutely stuck and when I told the manager at the Kansas City airport and showed my quote, I was told, in effect, too bad. This is the second time I've had a problem with Thrifty and also the second with carrentals.com. Thrifty overrents and I once had too wait two hours for a vehicle. DO NOT USE EITHER COMPANY EVER! Stick with hotwire.com or orbitz, neither of which I have ever had a problem.
Comments
In addition, the car had no air conditioning and when I started phoning the agency on the 0700 number supplied on the rental agreement, I was constantly put on hold and transferred to other agents and found out later, why. The 0700 is not toll free number, but costs appr €1.- ($1.35) per minute, an attractive side income for the agency. Should you be in the unfortunate position to have to call the agency for help, use their German direct dial number 0203-348-5422. It will still be a long-distance call, but infinitely cheaper than the 0700 number. I spent an additional $50 in calling the agency for help, which I never got. I drove around in an oven for 3 weeks with temperatures of over 30C (85F). It later turned out that the connecting hoses for the A/C on this brand-new car were missing.
expensive car insurance, otherwise they block @l,200 euros on your credit car, l regret it now
as l was given a car with lots of dents and scratches and to add insult insult to injury the receptionist said
ah sure as its all ready got scratches and scuffs you wont have to pay for them as you,ve now got full
insurance, this was before i,d even driven the car. The moral of the story is if you take full insurance
you get a bashed up car, take no extra insurance and you will get a pristine one, so they can charge
you for every tiny scratch on return ( also l had a 2008 model)
Dont use car rentals or Budget as neither helped at all while stuck with a 7 year old. Ended up taking the bus to Victoria station and got in after midnight without a car! Terrrible service.
The 7 year old has a try out for Arsenal under 8 team on Saturday and only got afew normal hours sleep. Never use carrentals again or budget.
I declined it. The manager finally cancel my reservation for August 16 and 17. I hope that they will refund my CAN$300.00 deposit to me in the next days. If nit, I would fight to the court. at 20:25, Friday, August 16, 2013
I will NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH CarRentals.com
again... EVER!
In my panic and anger on seeing this, I cancelled the car rental without realising that full charge applied for cancellation within 24 hours.
I was very lucky that I was using an iPad and had taken (as I usually do) a screenshot while payment was going through.
I then spent the next hour on the phone with the company and after much argument, emails and negotiations managed to get my money back.
Initially they refused any help, when I put up a fight they offered the same car without extra cost (but double the original cost) and then on my perseverance agreed a refund of what I paid. I demanded that the right thing to do is for the company to provide me with a car honoring the original quoted price and refund the extra they charged illegally. However the company refused to honor this, although they said several times "I fully understand where you are coming from". Their argument was that the price was changed by the actual rental company (which can change any moment) but I could not make them understand that no one but themselves is responsible for transactions on their own website.
In the process I lost a lot of valuable time, money on phone calls, horrendous stress and possible exchange rate loss on credit card refund. I detailed this to the company immediately, over a month later I am yet to receive even an apology. Oh, and, during my calls to them, I was accused of using a previous day's quote (as the time on the screen shot was 2 hours behind UK time they thought I was trying to cheat until I explained my geographical location). It took me some effort to explain to them that, even if i was working on the previous day's quote, any decent website will not allow a credit card transaction on
I used 'ghhhhjjj' website for renting a car in UK. The price came up for a car from a reputed rental company. I accepted and paid using the credit card. An email came through with confirmation of booking and a bill for about double the amount!!!
In my panic and anger on seeing this, I cancelled the car rental without realising that full charge applied for cancellation within 24 hours.
I was very lucky that I was using an iPad and had taken (as I usually do) a screenshot while payment was going through.
I then spent the next hour on the phone with the company and after much argument, emails and negotiations managed to get my money back.
Initially they refused any help, when I put up a fight they offered the same car without extra cost (but double the original cost) and then on my perseverance agreed a refund of what I paid. I demanded that the right thing to do is for the company to provide me with a car honoring the original quoted price and refund the extra they charged illegally. However the company refused to honor this, although they said several times "I fully understand where you are coming from". Their argument was that the price was changed by the actual rental company (which can change any moment) but I could not make them understand that no one but themselves is responsible for transactions on their own website.
In the process I lost a lot of valuable time, money on phone calls, horrendous stress and possible exchange rate loss on credit card refund. I detailed this to the company immediately, over a month later I am yet to receive even an apology. Oh, and, during my calls to them, I was accused of using a previous day's quote (as the time on the screen shot was 2 hours behind UK time they thought I was trying to cheat until I explained my geographical location). It took me some effort to explain to them that, even if i was working on the previous day's quote, any decent website will not allow a credit card transaction on an expired page.
I would warn anyone against using this web site and I will soon be taking the matter up with authorities.
V
Daniel
I wasn't going to make it by 9:45 so they instructed me to make a back-up reservation. I tried to work with carrentals.com but they would not help, they instructed me to go back through the web site and get a refund from separately from the rental company. After I asked to be reimbursed for the difference they refused to accept responsibility for allowing me to book at a time when the supplier would not be open and refused to help in any way with the process.
Can't be sure anything on the website is correct and the company does not seem to be properly organized. On top of that, they refused to take responsibility for their mistakes and had no intention of taking care of the customer in any situation where there is a problem. Will never use again, would definitely recommend you look elsewhere for a car rental.