Holidayautos and Budget Scam

winger99

Sounded too good to be true. . . £28 for 3 days car hire!

But there is was on the holiday autos website - nothing more to pay.

Having paid holiday autos the £28 went on holiday thinking that was all I had to pay.

Having hired lots of cars I was expecting to be offered additional insurance products when collecting the car. I always decline the offer.

But this time it turns out that the add-on insurance was compulsory. Since I didn't have a credit card (from which they wanted to take a large deposit) my choices were pay an additional £46 for insurance or walk away and get the bus.

I had no choice. So the car hire cost me £74 not £28. A clear scam designed to force you into taking their rip-off insurance product.

That's £46 for 3 days insurance! That's over £5k and it didn't even include they tyres! Outrageous rip off.

Obviously I won't be using holidayauto.co.uk ever again and of course I won't be ever using Budget Car Hire again. I'll stick with AVIS or Hertz where add-on insurance isn't mandatory.

Beware!

zagfles

It is usual for them to want to reserve the excess on your CC if you don't take their "Super CDW" to cover it. Sometimes they even charge and refund (Hertz in Majorca did this).

Obviously_the_best

Lets turn this around. If you owned a car worth £15 000, would you let someone take it out who didn't have good enough credit to get a credit card. Because that's what you're saying to them. A credit card is free, if you can get one, I highly recommend you do.

It's not a scam, it's them covering their (very expensive) property from people who can't prove they're trustworthy.

Many hire companies have this policy, it would have been in the Holiday Autos terms and conditions, which you obviously failed to read, and I'm amazed you haven't come across a company with this policy before.

p.s. Mods, could you take the word scam out of the title, it's very misleading.