Abandoned by Europcar & out 4000 pounds

ScullysGirl

Do you guys know of a good consumer advocate I can appeal to? In September we were back visiting England from the US, and used Europcar for our hire car. Enroute back to the airport on the last day, we suffered a flat. I don't blame them for that. It was 8:30am, our flight was at 15:00, so we had hours. Heathrow was about 90 minutes away. We called the helpline on their documentation, and they sent Mike, who got to us rather quickly. We were on a country lane with 10 foot brambles on either side so could not safely remove our two young sons from the car. He spent an hour on the phone with Europcar before leaving us with a note saying "No lock nut tool in car. National Car Rental was no help at all", promising a tow. Apparently they never leave a spare but he didn't know that. They continuously kept forgetting about us so the tow didn't come for 3 hours, so we missed our flight. We begged them to take us to a safe place, but they would just forward our call to RAC. When we asked to be able to leave the car, I was reminded any damage would be our responsibility, to the cost of 18k GBP. When it was apparent we would miss our flight & the tow still hadn't arrived, I asked Europcar (again, calling from a US cellphone) where we were supposed to go. They told us to call back Monday at 8am (it was Saturday at 11). I am now out the cost of the rental, all the massive extra's they've added, plus the 2kGBP for the new flights home. I have tried to fight it, but they have a warped timeline (mine I can prove, theirs they cannot), but they simply replied that the flat tyre couldn't be blamed on them, and even though RAC admits to being very late, they couldn't guarantee we ever would have made our flight anyway. I have disputed with the credit card but I'm still very worried. Plus, I'm still out the cab to the airport (Europcar refused to send us another car) plus the phone calls, not to mention the flights. Not certain what to do. I no longer live in the UK so I'm a bit out of my depth. We were able to get on another flight the following morning. It was horrific.

visidigi

What have your travel insurance said?