My holiday's automatic petrol swindlers (holidayautos.co.uk)

Member Name: dewhirstj

Product:	holidayautos.co.uk
Date:	16/07/01 (354 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gets you from A to B, You can go wherever you want whenever you want, Second car was great

Disadvantages: Petrol Swindlers, First car was quite dirty and in fairly bad condition

After arriving in Dalaman airport, Turkey (see my op for more) at 4am and paying my visa, collecting bags etc, I headed off to find my car rental company.

At the exit to the airport I was welcomed by the cool, still air of Turkey... and a load of noisy car hire company representatives.

I met my representative, who did actually turn out to be very friendly, while he was chatting to another company, holding a 'Holiday Autos' clipboard in front of his face.

He led us down to a white car, bigger and more modern than we expected...surprise, surprise. It wasn't ours, just a free taxi to take us down to the HQ.

In the HQ (I won't bother describing it, it was basically a house with the front room set aside for the company) we had forms thrust in front of us to sign and fill in, which must of taken about half an hour. Then they took us to our car.

To be fair, it was bigger than I expected but it was basically an old banger. Oh well, it did the job. Just.

Changing gears was hard and required effort and the car seemed to find it hard going uphill. Okay, so this was our transport (unless we resorted to the smoky Dolbuses) for a week.

FOUR DAYS LATER...
We recieve a phone call to our apartments in Içmeler. The company say that a couple flying into Bodrum have ordered the same car. They couldn't ask them to change in mid-flight or in Britain, so they asked us. The car was much better, so we were very pleased... but there was just one problem that we realised afterwards.

When issued the car we were told that the tank was one QUARTER full. While leaving Dalaman we filled it up to a full tank. By now the car was just over THREE-QUARTERS full and the new car had only one QUARTER of a tank. We didn't require any more petrol but we had been swindled. If the company did that with every car, they could make a healthy 'petrol' profit.

We were going to ask for our money back
, but decided against it as we reached Dalaman, so as not to cause further hassle.

I'm NOT saying don't hire a car in Turkey thought. It really is a VERY GOOD IDEA. The driving is fine and if you want to get away from noise and packed beaches to quieter and more secluded areas, I highly recommend it. Don't listen to what the travel agent says, they've never tried it.

RATINGS BELOW BASED ON FIRST CAR

Summary: