Foreign Perspectives

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I’m not sure if it’s the worst carhire firm, but it’s certainly right up there.

When we originally made our booking way back in May, we arrived to find that nobody was there. In fact, there is never anyone in their office at Perpignan station unless there are car hire bookings. Indeed, there’s rarely anyone there even when there are bookings if our experience is anything to go by.

Roll things on to yesterday and, as you know, the guy flat out refused to let us take the new car without a card authorisation (which he clearly didn’t understand blocked that amount from our account) and neither would he let us take the old car to pick up a card that we’d have needed to give him. This, despite us having 90 minutes left on the carhire.

This morning we thought we’d call to check that he had a car. We’re still waiting for him to call back and frankly don’t believe that he has a car despite us having paid for it.

So, if you’ve a choice: don’t book with ADA.

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ADA have been after me for quite a while now to add their logo to my sites, so here it is.

As you know, we’ve been renting a far from them since our own was wrecked by a tractor way back at the end of May. In that we’re quite a good customer for them you’d think that we would be due some brownie points for that, wouldn’t you?

Well, we’ve been renting the car for so long that they need it back as they’ve to return it to the leasing company and we agreed to make the changeover today.

We’d arranged to change it over at the airport as the town centre location is a bit of a nightmare to get in and out of plus it doesn’t have terribly long working hours.

Anyway, we dropped James off at school and off we went to the airport.

First off, we were going to have to pay for all the damage to the car. Kind of peculiar seeing as it was already damaged when we picked it up, eh?

Next he said he had a little two seater car for us. Yes, a car smaller than we had ordered and useless to us as we need at least a four seater. So, whereas other car hire firms would have been upgrading our car after such a long rental, ADA were going to make quite a downgrade.

Finally, he said he’d to do an authorisation on our card for another EUR 600. Now, that wouldn’t matter too much with a UK credit card but a French debit card it does. In particular it means that EUR 1200 would have been blocked in our account and in fact we’d not have been able to extend the car rental next week as planned.

Nope, he couldn’t do anything about any of that.

So, we’re sans-voiture. We’re also down EUR 70 as we needed to get a taxi to the school to collect James.

Next time, if there is one, I’ll tell them to collect the car if they want it because we certainly aren’t going to be helpful to them when there is zero service in response.

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Clearly it’s normally cheaper buying stuff online where no delivery is involved so, yes, buy your software online if it can be delivered via download. However, for big stuff it’s not necessarily the case that buying online is really cheaper.

Take our planned new car for instance….

The list price is EUR 13,000, the online price is EUR 12,000. However, few people pay the list price and in fact we have already gotten the offered price down to EUR 12,600 and hope to get that down a good deal more.

Even at that price though there’s little real difference from the online price. For one thing, if we get the online car delivered, they add EUR 600 ie the price would be the same. Even if we collect it ourselves that costs a fair bit as it’s in Paris and we’re in the south of France so if we drive up to get it that’s EUR 50 each way in tolls, plus EUR 50 in petrol each way, plus at least three hotel nights at around EUR 50 each: total, a minimum of EUR 350 and more than likely over EUR 400 but even that is before you count at least three days worth of meals which could easily add another EUR 200.

OK, so a car is a pretty big item to deliver and therefore it’s none too likely that you’ll find them on Amazon anytime soon but even for relatively light things the postage charge can exceed the savings that you make online unless the discount is very substantial.

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