Car Hire Pre-approved Charges when not Taking Rental Excess Coverage

alfiegs61

I like to think of myself as an experienced traveller and take 3 to 4 foreign holidays a year and take usually hire a car. I diligently watch rates and end up with a good rental deal, I have my own Excess Insurance so I always decline the rental companies Excess coverage. The normal practise for this is that they take a pre-payment authorisation of upto £1500 which in all previous occasions has been cancelled on return of the car.
In March I hired through Rhodium (aka Goldcar) in Fuerteventura, 2 weeks for a Citroen DS3  for £91 BARGAIN. I duly returned the car and was invoiced with no additional charges. But I have just received my credit card statement. I was Charged €1200 when I picked the car up this was then converted to sterling with a £30 non-sterling transaction fee, then when it was dropped off I was charged another £30. There was also the difference in the exchange rate in buy and selling Euro which resulted in an overall bank charge of £85 for a rental of £91. 
I'm not sure if this is a sharp practise by Goldcar, Barclaycard or genuine mistake but I'm contacting both to try and sort it out.

Alan_Bowen

Goldcar appear in this forum more than any supplier in travel, if you didn't read the reviews before you booked then you must one of the few who do not query how anyone can provide a car for two weeks for less than £100

TheRightOne

If you were charged a fee, then they didn't just take an authorisation, they actually charged the amount.
That, coupled with the fact that you did not use a no forex fee card for the deposit, means that you were hit with hefty card charges.

You need to look at the T&C to see if they were allowed to actually take the payment. Booking direct with GoldCar, they are not allowed to do so on a Credit Card. But if you used a Broker, you should check their T&C.

If you booked direct and their T&C confirms that authorisations only are taken on credit cards, approach your card provider to make up your losses, as there should be none if only an authorisation is applied.

zagfles

I've had it where they've charged and refunded, think it was Hertz in Majorca but not sure. But as I use a fee free card it didn't matter too much, and I was lucky that the exchange rate didn't move much.

But I'm surprised you lost out on the exchange rate movement. The £ was falling against the euro in March, certainly up to around the lockdown, so you should have gained on the movement. 

[Deleted User]

I booked a car hire with B Rent in Naples May 2019.
After being panicked into paying almost£200 for excess I paid on my credit card.
Ive open up my credit card statement and they have taken an unauthorised payment of €50.00 in March 2020 from the same card. No contact from them asking for any other payment so have been fraudulently tricked.
I know that Italy is struggling but this is down and out fraud.
Have contacted them but as you would expect no response.
Hopefully my credit card provider will assist.

AlexMac

alfiegs61 said:

I'm not sure if this is a sharp practise by Goldcar, Barclaycard or genuine mistake but I'm contacting both to try and sort it out.

Good luck with that; but as regards Goldcar, I wouldn't hold my breath, so, sympathies for what might be an expensive lesson.

I flit between this forum and Tripadvisor's, where (especially on the Spain forum) there are many tens of thousands, if not the low hundreds of thousands of even worse allegations of malpractice or fraud.  And Googling "Goldcar" reveals almost half a million results; I suspect not many of them complimentary?  I assume that fuelling scams, fake damage, insurance pressure-selling and other dodges are simply part of their well-thought out business model, which (correctly?) assumes an endless supply of naive new customers rather than aspiring to repeat business or bookings by customers savvy enough to check reviews first?

There are good, cheap operators out there, however, so the comment above "you must one of the few who do not query how anyone can provide a car for two weeks for less than £100" is a little harsh. TA's forums are however good for suggestions of recommended local operators.  I used one - Helle Hollis- for the 1st time from Malaga in Feb March  (just before lockdown, luckily).  They were an equally incredible price; well less than 10 euros a day for an 11-day rental, an upgraded new car, incredible customer service and no time-wasting messing about trying to sell me extras extras; like you, I have my own excess insurance and I opted for full-full fuelling.  Only 500 euros deposit, no messing about with translating this to GBP (which some traders do through sleight of hand on card swiping), although as I have a Halifax Clarity Credit card with no overseas transaction fees, it's bombproof. I've sometimes clocked the "suggested price in GBPs" in on-the screen conversion at  tremnals or ATMs and it's usually disasterous when compared with Halifax's rate on my CC bill.

Better luck next time