Europcar Heathrow.Arrived off a 32-hour flight from New Zealand. Tired and disorientated I arrived at the desk ready to produce my CarTrawler.com voucher for the 30-day rental. This was not required, apparently. I asked about an upgrade to a car with automatic transmission and was told that one was available at an additional 25 GBP per day. I was told by Danielle that because she was not (now) going to be charging me for the additional driver (upon the return of the vehicle) that additional cost would only ‘feel’ like 5 GBP per day as the additional driver would have otherwise been charged at 20 GBP per day. We signed the documents, drove away and then 30 minutes later realised we’d been well and truly conned by Danielle.The cost of the additional driver, for the original vehicle or for the upgrade was NOT 20 GBP per day (or 600 GBP in total). It’s only 186 GBP for the whole period (according to their website) for the upgraded vehicle. I phoned Customer Services from a service station on the M5, who also said that the 186 was too cheap and it they’d never offer an additional driver for less that 13 GBP per day.So, having already paid 1,034 GBP for the original vehicle I was stung for another 1,035 GBP for the upgrade. The payment was taken out of my bank account, and this prompted an email to their customer services. Several emails later, during which I was told that “You’ve signed the documents, so you had to pay”, and that “I (the customer service rep) was not there when you had the conversation with Danielle, so I can’t confirm or corroborate what was said and so can’t offer a refund for the difference” etc etc, it went on.The upgrade vehicle, should I have booked that originally, would have cost me 1,390 +186 = 1,576. I was conned out of 492 GBP. I wasn’t asking for a refund for the whole amount, just this difference. I would have been happy to pay the correct price for the vehicle that I had.The whole ‘show’ was a farce. “For this deal I need to get my manager to sign this off. It’s that good” (Danielle). The whole things was a well-practiced hustle.This whole experience really played on my mind for the whole of my holiday in the UK. This experience and realisation of their wrongdoing was something I was unable to reconcile with.Avoid, avoid, avoid. I hope my that by writing this I can help others to avoid a similar experience.Reply from Owner following my Google review . . "Hello David,We appreciate your feedback and we are sorry to learn you were dissatisfied with our service.Give us the chance to solve the issue by providing more details using this link **** where our customer service team will be in touch."Total waste of time. No change in stance, just "Europcar UK have provided you with an explanation for the fee you raised. Based on the information available and the explanation from Europcar UK, we regret to inform you that the upgrade fee is valid and cannot be waived."
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