A salutary tale about car hire booking

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Oct 12, 2009
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SW London, Poland and all Europe
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8,876
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A Class N+B Arto 69GL
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Since 2009
I have just been booking a car hire for our 2 week Christmas trip to Gran Canaria.

After trying to do it online and entering all the data about passport, driving licence etc. it kept telling me my date of birth was wrong.

So I phoned reservations and was dealt with very efficiently by a very fluent English-speaker(turns out Mother and Grandmother are English). All she needed to take the booking was the car wanted, pick-up point, dates and my surname. Reservation was confirmed by e-mail in minutes - none of the guff needed for the online system. No excess, 2nd driver free and no payment made in advance.

I must have spent 20-30 minutes on the website and in the end it was done in less than 5 minutes(including 1-2 minutes holding) on the phone.

I know some companies to not publish tel numbers but in future if they have one I will try it first. This happened to be Cicar Car Hire.
 
Friends of ours have just returned from Lanzarote, and their hire car was 'keyed' the night before they were due to leave. Not a usual key along the body as such, but a deliberate up and down zig zag. And as there was no time to get the police involved before leaving, they thought their insurance would cover it. Wrong! In small print, vandalism isn't covered, so 800e was taken from their credit card. They have also found out someone else had their hire car 'keyed' in the same manner. Is this a 'scam'?

Craig
 
We hired a car in Gran Canaria, we were walking near the hire company and saw an identical car with the hire company's sticker we looked at the number plates they were also identical. Presumably the hire firm were running at least two cars on one set of paperwork, we didn't have any problems but I have wondered what would have happened to us if we had been caught.
 
Been on the island for the last 2 weeks and here until Valentine’s Day (may fly back for quick visit if E&P deliver my spares for my levelling system) We have a place in Maspalomas.
Rental car prices rocketed after COVID but great to find they are back at normal levels. We have a new VW Polo at a cost of €6 a day. It does have a €1800 excess but that is covered under a rental excess insurance policy for £42 per annum.
Cicar are one of the bigger rental companies, you see a lot of their cars as they normally have special paint jobs. My advice would be to film the car at the collection carpark, both inside and out. We have once been challenged about damage to a car and as soon as I said we have a video they were fine.
We have had heavy rain for the last 2 days but sun is shining now with a morning temperature of 23 Degrees C and reaching around 26 tomorrow.
 
Before covid some of the hire cars were over 4 years old and looked right out of a demolition derby. The hire companies didn't care about any new damage.

But now that they are all fairly new, they might take more notice.

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