Given there may well be a fair few people switching from Hertz, I thought I'd do a mini-TR of my recent Europcar rental. Not exactly glamorous, and no champagne or dancing-girls, but may have some useful practical info for some.
I booked online the night before. £18.95 including Blue discount for a 5-hour rental. Do remember that you need to pick up your car before midday for this rate, and online booking needs at least two hours' notice.
While we're on booking, a few pointers. I booked on
www.bmicarrental.com, in order to get the extra 200 miles. You can login to My Europcar during the booking process and it prepopulates your personal details (although not credit card or FF info). The booking showed up immediately in My Europcar.
No point in going via Quidco, because the BMI contract rate requires postpayment, and Quidco (7%) is only payable on prepays. It's *probably* possible to get Quidco & BMI miles (not the 200 online booking bonus) by going directly to europcar.co.uk and prepaying. Maybe even possible to use my favourite discount code (BAA, 45244202, 20%) and get miles - it certainly got me M&M miles - but I'll wait until the double miles promo is over before trying these. If anyone else has any experience, speak up.
I pitched up to NCL and strode up to the desk, hiding my face from my friends at Hertz. It's very handy for arrivals by Metro or domestic flights. A short walk from international arrivals. The guy at the Europcar desk punched a few keys for a while and apologised that he had nothing available. Since I was 10 minutes early, I said I'd come back in while. Before I could finish he handed me a £4 Starbucks voucher ^ and told me he would 'see if he could get any sense out of my Polish people'!
Coffee and muffin duly scoffed (and a brief look on the Europcar website for their overbooking policy @:-)), and I was back at the counter. Car found. No hard sell on the insurance. Sign here, there, there, initial that, sign your life away (most of which I couldn't read because it had been printed on a dot-matrix last serviced in 1983).
I also showed him my
Privilege Card. I'm still not exactly sure what it's for, nor when it might come in useful, and neither was he. He confirmed that I would still need to show my licence every time, even though it was already on file. It may be that it's just a pointless shiny version of my online profile.
Out into the car park, ignoring the 'No Access to Car Hire' warning signs
. There was a brief search before the car turned up, rather amusingly, in a Hertz 5* bay, (not one of my 5* rentals to date has been in one...).
Returning it, 34 miles later, I was rather dismayed to see the needle drop from full to 3/4 about 2 miles from the airport. It drank £6.50 worth of fuel before it clicked and the buggering needle hadn't even moved. Returned the keys to the desk and told them about the needle. 'I bet it was a Corsa. Divvn't worry aboot it, man'. And so I set of merrily into the sunset.
The completed invoice turned up for perusal in My Europcar the following day ^ with - guess what - a refuelling charge of 2 litres
on which they've charged VAT
I guess in summary they're no better or worse than anyone else. The £4 voucher was a nice touch, but the refuelling charged pi$$ed me off. I will certainly be complaining about the less-than-full tank I got originally, which I otherwise would have let go. Customer relations are impossible to get hold of, but then Hertz don't exactly make themselves easy to contact.
> Will the (double) BMI miles ever post? How long will it take for Europcar to reverse the fuelling charge? Am I the only one posting in this thread? Find out in next week's thrilling episode.