BUYER BEWARE: DON’T BE THRIFTY WITH CAR HIRE

LET the Lawsons add our own experiences of car-hire firms’ chicanery to those the Mail has already set out.

Actually the Lawson parents — us — had no grounds for complaint from Europcar, from whom we picked up our vehicle at Trieste airport in the north-eastern tip of Italy. The woman at the Europcar office was delightful, and even threw in a free TomTom to help us with our navigation ( we planned to make a number of trips into neighbouring Slovenia).

But our elder daughter’s experience with a firm called Thrifty (in fact part of Hertz) was quite the opposite.

After a couple of days, she had decided she wanted to explore with her friend in the opposite direction — west, to Venice. Booking online via

rentacar.com — and finding Thrifty to be the cheapest — she was asked to pay just under €100 on deposit, prior to picking up the vehicle. This she did by debit card.

Then when she got to the Thrifty office at Trieste airport to pick up the car and pay the full charge, she was told a debit card was unacceptable. But as a full-time student with a student’s bank balance she didn’t have access to cash there and then (parents being deep in Slovenia). So the man from Thrifty — not at all pleasant, she said — just shot off with the car they had supposedly hired.

When she tried to get her deposit back from rentacar.

com they told her that Thrifty had already taken the money from them, so they wouldn’t refund her. And when she rang Thrifty, they said ‘you should have read the terms and conditions’. Which indeed seem to allow them to take online debit card deposits via a third party and then refuse the same (perfectly valid) card when you show up to pay in person. And then leave you in the lurch. As my daughter pointed out, they certainly live up to the name Thrifty — but at their customers’ expense.

Anyway, she then went to the Europcar office at Trieste airport and met the same charming woman we dealt with — who took pity on her plight and gave her a discount. So the moral of this is: choose your holiday car hire firms carefully — and when it looks very cheap, be wary.