Holiday Autos charge in Euros on a UK card

macliam

This is a new one on me after years of arranging Car Hire online.

I went to holidayautos.co.uk and arranged a car hire which was priced in sterling and payable in advance. OK, no surprises with the exchange rate, etc. BUT now the charge has appeared on my Visa bill in Euros and with a nice £6.22 conversion fee attached.

I saw nothing about the charge being made in Euros - if I had done I would have used a card that doesn't charge a conversion fee .... so I'm a bit miffed to pay extra so that a supposedly UK-based site can raise the charge abroad.

I have used companies based in Greece, Cyprus, France (all .com sites, not .uk) but the charge has always been raised in sterling unless otherwise advised.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Car hire is a complete minefield - and the range of pitfalls seems to change every year.

This year we decided to buy our own annual insurance so we at least don't have to buy extra insurance at the desk any more.

As it happens we've just booked Holiday Autos but I think we twigged somewhere that they bill in the local currency. Hopefully they haven't dared to use Dynamic Currency Conversion on your card and make the FOREX conversion themselves? That would certainly miff me if they tried it as my Metrobank card normally incurs no FOREX fees or commission!

I noticed that the Holiday Autos deal we plumped for was about 3% less expensive when booked on their website direct than the deal we were finally able to secure with them by using the Quidco link - however, we are expecting 15% cashback so should be quids in!

Commiserations however - it is nigh on impossible to fathom all the small print variations in these deals!

benjus

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

Hopefully they haven't dared to use Dynamic Currency Conversion on your card

You're thinking of the situation where they use the card's native currency instead of the currency of the transaction, i.e. the reverse of this situation.

macliam

Well I got past the isue of the "Free second driver" on the site and "15 Euros for a second driver" on the voucher (let's see which they honour!)

But this is paying Holiday Autos direct, not the hire company. Because they're now part of Car Trawler (like Argus) they seem to be run out of Dublin ..... but they still use a .co.uk website suffix...... grrr

Agree Car Hire is a minefield, currently the "Pick up full, return empty" scam is in full swing. Pick up a car with 80 Euros of fuel, get ripped off 105 Euros for it, return the car with a quarter tank, no refund. Ker-ching, let's count how many ways we can rip you off!

However, something just feels wrong when a .co.uk site quoting a price in Sterling charges in Euros......

macliam

Interesting reply from Holiday Autos - it would all seem to be my faullt

Total Rental Cost £ 207.73(GBP)
Rental Cost Payable Now £ 207.73(GBP)
Amount Payable Now 247.11(EUR)
Rental Cost Payable on Arrival £0
The amount payable today will be processed in EUR at today's exchange rate.
Exchange rates used by your credit card company may vary.

Supposedly (as part of a fairly complex process) these last two lines advise me that the amount will be debited in Euros - which I guess they do, but hardly clearly.

Interestingly they say since I "chose to see the quotation in GBP". I used the .co.uk site, it defaults to sterling as you would expect ..... so I did not choose.

All in all, be aware that Holiday Autos is now an offshore company, charging in Euros, not sterling - and you are likely to see a surcharge for conversion from you Bank or Card company on any dealings with them.

Good to see they have the customer's welfare in mind!