Holiday Autos Review

Overall Rating

The car was relatively clean and didn't break down (this is the bear minimum expected of a hire company anyway)

The hidden charges
The wait at the airport
A general lack of openess by holiday autos

I booked my recent spanish car hire through holiday autos thinking they were a reputable company and of course they were very competitive. Well all I can say is that sometimes it's worth paying a little extra to book with some of the more established brands.

The booking over the internet was all nice and straight forward, I even paid extra for the additional excess cover as you really never know and the last thing you want is a holiday spoilt by a £1000 excess.

All was good until we arrived at Malaga airport. Walking down from arrivals to the car hire hall I spotted a massive line of people coming up the ramp into arrivals. I wondered what they were waiting for...it turned out it was the line for Goldcar (holiday auto's rental partner at malaga airport). No joke, I lined up for 2.5 hours to get to the front desk. Believe me when I say there were literally hundreds of rather disgruntled holiday makers eager to get there holiday in motion but to fall at the last and some would say relatively straight forward hurdle of picking up their hire car.

When we eventually got to the front desk we found out what the hold up was. Basically everyone was complaining about the hidden car hire charges. These were as follows:

- breakdown - if you broke down most hire companies send out recovery especially considering that it's their car! With Holiday Autos you are not covered so you have to pay an additional charge for this peace of mind
- insurance - it turns out that you are not covered for cracked windscreens, flat tires, underside damage etc i.e. the things that are most likely to go wrong with a hire car.
- A really crafty hidden charge is that you have to pay for a full tank of petrol and return the car empty. You may think that this sounds acceptable however, we were charged 70 euros for petrol. This was a compact car so it didn't have a lorry sized petrol tank. I don't know how they calculated the cost. The reality was that we only used half a tank, therefore they charged the next punter for a full tank when they only had to half fill it. Why can't they be like other rental companies whereby you received the car with a full tank and return it with a full tank?

I know you might be saying it's not Holiday Autos fault however, I maintain that Holiday is the agent of Goldcar and they certainly didn't make the hidden costs clear on their website. Goldcar asked us to take it up with Holiday autos as it wasn't their fault.

All told we paid an additional 120 euros for this car over and above what was advertised on holiday autos. It did leave a bitter taste in our mouths.

The irony is by paying a little extra up front elsewhere we would have saved a lot of money.