Holiday Headaches Courtesy of Holiday Autos (holidayautos.co.uk)

Member Name: louiseypees

Product:	holidayautos.co.uk
Date:	08/10/08 (534 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well, you will probably manage to get a car of some description from them

Disadvantages: Useless service, clueless staff

I have a very love/hate relationship with the lastminute group - the people who own Holiday Autos. Lastminute.com have been responsible for some great moments in my life over the last few years: some brilliant hotels; some massively discounted theatre tickets; even a few meals. But they've also been responsible for sitting me behind whacking great posts in theatres; for booking me on a ryanair flight without telling me I'd have to pay for luggage; for selling me a "city break" to Florence where I stayed about 20 miles out of Florence (imagine booking a city break to London and ending up on an industrial park in Luton and you're about there); and most unforgivably for making me deal with Holiday Autos.

Holiday Autos is the imaginatively titled car hire branch of the lastminute group. You can hire a car through them from most international airports that you would want to travel to (destinations in Iraq and Iran are notable exceptions) and many other locations - often city centres. They act in a similar way to lastminute.com, which is as an agent. Holiday Autos are not going to give you a car themselves. Instead, they are going to get you a good rate with a third party company.

Booking your hire car is pretty easy through either of the online channels. All you need to do is enter your requirements on their website - where you want to pick up and drop off your car, the dates and times you want to do it and they will come back with an instant quote. The quotes are usually fairly competitive, but often not a huge amount cheaper than you'll find elsewhere.

The first time I used Holiday Autos, we had no problems at all. All we were interested in from our hire car was four wheels and an engine so that we could get from Venice over to a nice remote B+B in the Veneto countryside without having to negotiate trains, taxis and buses. All went smoothly. We had a nice little Fiat Punto, we picked it up and dropped it off as planned - perfect. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and with the benefit of it now I can see that we had a good experience only because we didn't have to use their customer service.

So when we went back to Italy (the same destination actually - it was that nice!) this year, we used them again. This time there were six of us going on holiday, so we wanted to order a six seater car. As you do, when there are six of you.

Problem number one happened while booking online. My partner's switch card wasn't being accepted by their banking systems, with him being told it was one digit short to be a valid card. It wasn't. So he phoned up their customer services department, where he was greeted by an under-trained and over-smug operator who said that, yes, his card number was wrong. After around 40 minutes of useless chatter, including the line "but in my experience, all switch cards have more digits than that" (remember that one, it becomes funnier later), he asked to be passed on to the supervisor. The supervisor, to his credit, managed to get the payment through (hardly rocket science really) and told my partner that the operator he'd spoken to had only started two days ago (so "in his experience" was two days and the computer saying no in front of him!). After an apology for the attitude problem of operator number one, we were on our way, having received reassurances from both the original operator and the supervisor that we had hired a suitable six seater car. With six whole seats. Which would seat six people.

I think you may be able to guess what is coming. It's more predictable than Titanic. We arrived to a Renault Scenic - you know the ones - five seats, quite ugly? Yes, that's five seats, each of which was designed to take but one human rear end.

We immediately went back to Sixt (the car hire company we'd been assigned) to ask them for a six seater. Unfortunately for us, there were no six seater Sixt cars in Venice airport. Luckily, two of our party were arriving separately to us, so we were able to take the unsuitable Scenic and phone Holiday Autos when we got to our B+B to sort out the problem... in theory.

So we did just that. Unfortunately, Holiday Autos' customer service department are completely ill-equipped to deal with any problems that may crop up. We were told that they couldn't do anything "because the booking was put through for a five seater" - which, as we'd had to book over the phone and two of their staff had assured us that we'd booked a six seater, didn't feel like a great excuse. Despite around three hours spent on the phone to their call centre (not cheap from Italy), the key importance of the car having been booked over the phone and so being their responsibility failed to register.

After two of these three hours of tedious phone calls, one supervisor decided to start looking for a solution to our problems - an additional car so that we would have seats in cars for all of our party. He even managed to find one. But then when it came to the crunch, the best he could offer us was allowing us the privilege of paying for it in full ourselves and then trying to claim the cost back from them when we got back to the UK. "Trying to claim", not claiming. We decided to pass on their kind offer.

Other things they managed to get wrong included:

Holiday Autos hadn't told us about the credit card deposit of Euro500 that is required when the car is picked up. It was just as well we were travelling with my Dad, is all I can say - we hadn't had this charge the previous year.

Holiday Autos refused to offer us our suggestion of a part refund - the difference between the cost of the Scenic and their cheapest five seater car - by way of apology for the error (frankly, I thought this was a more than reasonable suggestion on our part).

Holiday Autos' useless service ended up costing us around an extra £50 in phone calls while we were aborad, and a small fortune in train tickets.

Holiday Autos re-attempted a failed payment on my debit card eight times before we managed to book on my partners' card (which only happened when we got to the supervisor anyway) - this resulted in my bank blocking my debit card when I was away as they thought it was being used fraudulently.

Holiday Autos were responsible for hiring us a car through Sixt, who decided to inexplicably charge my Dad £80 after we'd returned the car - for a tank of petrol (which we'd filled at the airport, so they were clearly trying it on) and for damage to the car that wasn't there - which we are disputing.

So, in summary, you'll probably have an ok experience with Holiday Autos if you want to rent a cheap small car. Make sure you have funds available on your credit card for a deposit when you pick your car up; make sure you take photographs of the car when you leave it at the airport (although how much difference this makes is anyone's guess); and most importantly make sure you don't have to make any changes to your booking or call their customer services team for anything!

For a more specialist car than the very bottom of the range, don't even look at Holiday Autos. If you anticipate your plans changing at all, or any other reason why you may feasibly need customer service, don't use them. Like a lot of things in the wonderful world of travel, Holiday Autos is a false economy. It may cost you £10, maybe even £20 less than the competition, but it really is worth paying the extra to save yourself the huge costs you will run into if something goes wrong. Example - once we used Car Hire 3000 (who you would imagine to be a bunch of cowboys with a name like that) but had managed to book a car at the wrong airport. They proactively called us to query our booking as they wanted to check we had the right airport. When we discovered we had got it wrong, they changed it for us at no extra cost and with one day's notice. I can promise you that you will not find service like this if you book with Holiday Autos.

Summary: Only for your most basic car hire needs.