NEVER USE A COMPANY CALLED HOLIDAY…
NEVER USE A COMPANY CALLED HOLIDAY AUTOS They refused to provide us with any refund of the £522 we paid for a hire car in Corfu which they did not provide.
The instructions from Holiday Autos were to collect the car from the Thrifty desk at the airport when we arrived, but Thrifty would not provide the car and Holiday Autos will not provide any refund.
We booked the car with them in June for our family holiday in August. We arrived on a BA flight from London which had been delayed by about an hour (although we didn’t know about the delay until we were on the plane). The scheduled arrival time was 20:25 and we had booked the car from 20:30. After collecting our luggage we went to the Thrifty desk (at 21:50) and handed over the Holiday Autos voucher to a very unhelpful lady who said we were “no-shows”, she couldn’t provide a car and we should talk to Holiday Autos about it.
We rang Holiday Autos and was told by another unhelpful person that we had not arrived at the desk to collect the car within 29 minutes of the pick-up time on the booking – and that as a “no-show” the company would not provide any refund of our £522.
I was flabbergasted but both the agents I spoke to were adamant that they would not help me.
We were anxious to get to our apartment (an hour’s drive from the airport) before midnight to collect the key so we spoke to a very helpful Avis agent who was able to provide us an alternative – at almost exactly the same price as we had already paid to Holiday Autos.
In the light of day I have now looked at the nine-page document provided by Holiday Autos entitled “Car Hire Voucher”, which is the document I had had handed to the Thrifty agent.
Halfway down the 8th page of the voucher there is indeed a sub-section headed “What is a no-show?” which states:
A ''no-show'' occurs for the following reasons:
1 - You didn't inform us about your cancellation prior to your pick-up time.
2 - You failed to pick up the car at the agreed time and date selected without notifying our customer service team of any delay before the pick-up time.
3 - Your flight is delayed which results in a late arrival at the rental desk and your flight number was not provided.
4 - …
At the end of the list of “no-show” reasons it says “In the event of any of the above, no refunds will be made to you.”
Nowhere in the document does it say anything about there being only 29 minutes of grace before we were deemed to have failed to pick up the car at the agreed time.
We have booked many hire cars in the past, and have always perhaps been a little imprecise about the exact time that I would arrive to collect the car, assuming that I would be paying from the time booked even if I collect the car a little later. We have never heard of a policy of a no-refund cancellation for being half an hour “late” to pick up the car.
We find this policy absolutely staggering. How can they be justified in keeping all our money? We are retired and cannot afford to lose over £500 which was not budgeted for.
The agent that we spoke to at Holiday Autos said that there were many customers in his experience who forfeited the money they had paid because they had not read the small print of the ’contract’ which they rely on to operate this scam. Please spread the word that no one should use Holiday Autos and Thrifty is also not to br trusted.