If I could give less than 1 star I would. Europcar operate a 'scam' service. I was flying from Australia to London Heathrow and decided to hire a car from Europcar during the Doha lay over. I selected the car to be picked up at the airport, filled in all the necessary and selected to pay upfront. The process went through up to my bank where it came back with 'there was an error with your bank' (Scam 1)I found this odd as there were no issues. I tried a different credit card in case - same response. I tried calling Europcar, no answer. I decided to back myself up by selecting a 2nd rental from SIXT but to pay at the airport. Within seconds I received a SIXT confirmation of booking.We arrived at Heathrow on Sunday 23rd March at around 5pm and decided to first go to Europcar as we had in the interim received an email stating 'YOUR CAR IS WAITING FOR YOU' (SCAM 2), and we had made a payment and if it had gone through whilst we were in flight, we didn't want to pay twice. But we couldn't find Europcar. We asked SIXT desk and they said it is a shuttle SERVICE (Scam3). We went back to where the shuttle was supposed to be with 2 trolleys of suitcases. No signage. Went to ask again and told it is lane 3. Pushed the trolleys to lane 3 only to find it was not there. Asked again and directed me back to the first point. We waited 20m for a shuttle and a 20m drive to the EUROPCAR satellite office where there was another wait to be served of 15m. By this time it was now 8pm. I got to the front desk eventually, pulled up my email and the Europcar agent says 'you didn't finish your booking?'. I said I did and showed him the email stating 'your car is waiting'. He said that the booking was not confirmed, and the error message showed that. I asked why if the car wasn't available didn't they show this online and how was a customer to know that an error message for payment meant the vehicle wasn't available? He responded with that he could do the booking manually but there would be a price difference (Scam4). On the app it showed a 30GBP difference between online and at airport booking. We were tired and frustrated so said ok to the difference if it was small. We had booked an Electric JEEP for the week at a cost of 284GBP. The guy came back and said it was now 722GBP. I told him that was unacceptable. He said that due to the fire, all cars were booked out and no other rental company would have a car. It was now nearing 9pm, we had to be at a hotel 2hours drive from Heathrow and I think this is Europcar's plan (Scam 5). We refused to pay the price which was almost 3x that of the original booking and seeing we were not buying this scam, he said he could give a discount and we could get it for 520 GBP. The online at airport booking was 309GBP so he was trying his luck with the higher amounts. We refused and asked them to take us back to the airport.On arrival I went directly to the SIXT desk, was helped by a fantastic and knowledgeable lady and within 10m we had the car which we had selected, at the price we selected. Europcar you could learn a lot from SIXT.We are frequent travellers and will NEVER RENT FROM EUROPCAR again as they deliberately show cars online that they use to lure customers and then when the travellers are tired take advantage and try to scam by tripling the cost of the vehicle. You should be ashamed of yourself Europcar.
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