holidayautos.com > Reviews > unhelpful customer service

Author's product rating:   

Available selection	Satisfactory
Customer Service	Very unhelpful
Vehicle Quality	Satisfying
Value for Money	Very poor

Advantages:	Inclusive prices
Disadvantages:	unhelpful customer service

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

As we are going on our hols in October and had not booked a hire car with the tour operator, I thought that I would trawl the net for competitive quotes, which I had successfully done for the holiday, travel insurance and airport parking.

After a few high prices I came to holiday autos, put in all my details for a quote and was quite surprised when it came back cheaper than all the others, I then proceeded to the booking stage put in all our details, clicked to confirm and got the message this website is experiencing difficulties, so thought I'll try again in a little while, 1 hour later I tried again, same problem so I rang them.

Went through the booking with the man at the other end, up until this point everything was fine, because our flight arrived in the wee small hours I was told we wouldn't be able to pick up the car at the airport, this was fine because we had transfers available to our resort, was then told you'll have to come back to the airport to pick up your car, fine but our resort is the other side of the island, upon enquiring if they had another office on our side of the island, was told yes but they don't have any cars available, ok fair enough could we have it delivered to the resort, no we don't offer that facility, however you can pay an extra charge and collect it out of hours at the airport, (frustration is now setting in,) and as your flight leaves out of office hours you can leave it out of hours for another small charge. By the time he had finished putting on all the small charges for out of hours it had doubled the web quote.

I then made the fatal mistake of saying that is the total price right, well sort of there is a deposit but you can just leave an imprint of your credit card. Being very aware of fraud etc, I then asked what sort of protection I would have against the imprint being used fraudulently, he didn't know of anything but would ask his supervisor who didn't know either, I asked him if he could find out for me and ring me back.

Whilst waiting for his call I decided to logon to ciao, was looking through the travel section and found car hire, went through some and found carjet, logged on to their site and found a car with them, which can delivered and collected from our resort at no extra charge, no credit card imprint required nor a cash deposit plus the insurance is fully comp, all for half the price of holiday autos, (the car hire firm was the same one that holiday autos was quoting me for).

When he rang back I told him the price I had found on the net, only to be told we can't match that company because they are spanish, we only match uk based companies, he then said you'll probably be better off booking with them, obviously holiday autos don't need my business or did I just put them off with my question about credit card imprint fraud?