Car Hire Scams (Holiday Autos & CarWiz in this case)

I'm sick of it really, it is such a cockroach infested industry out there. Picking up the car is the one part of the holiday I hate, this blog I wrote sums up why...

We’d been looking forward to our summer holiday in Crete all year, the first time we’d gone away in the summer holidays as our daughters had got to that age where you really didn’t want to be taking them out of school.

Looking to see as much of Crete as possible we decided to hire a car for the fortnight, some of the cost of that would be recouped by not needing to pay for transfers to and from the airport to the resort, an hour’s drive away.

After setting off from home at 3am, and after car, airport and plane we finally arrived at around 1pm at Heraklion Airport. Leaving my family outside the terminal in the August heat of Crete (30 plus) I walked/jogged to the car hire area following the instructions sent by Holiday Autos to ‘CarWiz’ (or whatever they’re called).

On arrival at the Carwiz Portacabin I waited for a full 30 minutes while the one person dealing with customers tried to hard sell additional excess car insurance to the family in front of me. She went through the rules, how they assess damage, not listening to the (also English) customer’s repeated statements that he had already purchased insurance.

Obviously this is an age old scam designed to massively bump up their margins in a hugely competitive market. Read more HERE about an even worse saga where again Holiday Autos literally abandoned their customer and couldn’t have cared what happened to them.

Anyway when it came to my turn I asked them (politely) not to bother with the hard sell and just crack on to the bit where I sign stuff and you give me the car keys and I get on with my holiday, my family have been waiting for 45 minutes now.

As expected the lady explains I need to give over a credit card to make a deposit (800 euro) for any additional damage – which will be refunded assuming there is no damage – and I whip out my American Express card.

“We don’t take take American Express” says the lady.

“But the Holiday Autos website says you do” I explain and go on “I even paid for the hire using American Express”.

Now I suspect this is because they have to pay a bigger credit card fee for Amex and when margins are so tight they don’t want to accept it. To the point they would rather I walked away with no car.

“Do you have another credit card?” she asked.

I explained I didn’t, my wife may have her credit card. But then they said to use that I would need to add her as an additional driver – at a cost of 200 euro. Checkmate.

This went back and forth but to cut to the chase I could see what they were trying to do and I told them to stick their car. They gave me a form to sign and I left with no car.

We got a taxi to the hotel at cost of 90 euro and I emailed Holiday Autos the next day explaining what had happened and got no reply.

Only after several days when I made some noise on Twitter did they then suddenly get back to me asking me to DM them the details (basically get it off of Twitter because it looks bad).

They asked me to send them a copy of my driving licence, a bank statement showing I had credit on my card, my passport, my flight details. Basically I couldn’t do most of this as I was on holiday with no easy access to a scanner.

Each time I sought a reply I had to harry them on Twitter before they could be bothered to respond.

Halfway through the holiday we hired a car from Easycar (which was a great service by the way – and they accepted American Express AND didn’t try to shaft me) and got on with things, but still 800 euro down.

I’m lucky enough that I could afford to pay for another hire car while Holiday Autos still had my 800 euro and refused to give it back to me until I sent them the documents and then went through a 20 day ‘investigation’ process. But many people wouldn’t and this would have ruined their holiday.

I did ask Holiday Autos repeatedly to just call the local car hire firm and confirm what happened but they basically couldn’t be bothered and were content to leave us to it, even if it ruined our holiday.

I picked it up again when we returned from our holiday (which was great by the way, thanks) and the despicable Holiday Autos continued with their evasive tactics, asking me to reopen the case because it had expired and explain things all over again. At this point they were either being extremely belligerent or downright deceitful.

Either way it was only when I kicked off AGAIN on social media that they refunded 80% of my money with the rest to come when they concluded their ‘investigation’.

I requested they compensate me for the taxi as the fault was absolutely 110% between them (Holiday Autos) and CarWiz but after various excuses they finally pulled the “we’re just a broker” card effective saying you’re on your own when it goes wrong. They sent me the phone number in Greece for CarWiz and said I can sort it out with them.

Anyway they did finally acknowledge that CarWiz do say they take American Express cards which the Holiday Autos website states and that they would refund the rest of the 800 euro, to appear in my account in 5 days. As with everything above I have the emails to prove that.

That was 6 weeks ago and it still hasn’t been paid. And now they aren’t replying to my emails or Twitter messages.

I now need to consider if I can really expend the effort to pursue them through a small claims court process for £105.

I probably will on principle and also hope this blog at least costs them some future business because they are a truly shocking company.

That said, like many people I’m busy and really don’t have the time – I think they prey on this.

Incredibly despite my pointing this out Holiday Autos still carry CarWiz on their website and still say they accept American Express credit cards!

Stay well clear of both companies people….