Dear Ruth,
I recently went to Portugal for a holiday with my wife. I used Booking.com to hire a car with Green Motion, and paid £128.94 for a Peugeot 2008.
I had booked the car from 3pm on the day we arrived at Porto airport. However, due to a flight delay leaving London Gatwick and long passport queues at Porto, plus a big wait for the Green Motion shuttle bus from the airport to their offices, I did not get there to pick up the vehicle until around 5.30pm.
When I arrived, I was shocked my booking had been cancelled because I was more than two hours late. I had paid for the car in full, and had received no warning or alert that my booking was at risk of being cancelled.
The delay was out of my control. Green Motion took my rental payment and unilaterally cancelled the contract, retaining my payment. I did not want to be left without a car and have to go back to the airport to find another hire firm, so I paid €582.20 (£488.30) for another car – a Citroën C4 – with Green Motion.
Given the vagaries of flight travel I can’t imagine this is a rare occurrence, meaning Green Motion cancels your booking, pockets the upfront fee you’ve paid and puts you in the position of having to rebook another vehicle at an inflated price – more than three times what I paid through Booking.com originally. Essentially, I paid twice for the same service.
I complained to the Porto branch, and then to Green Motion’s head office, but my request for compensation was denied.
Please could you highlight this little-known policy of car hire firms cancelling your booking if you are late picking up the vehicle? And of course, if you’re able to force them to pay me a refund, I’d be very grateful.
– PS, south-west London
Dear reader,
You won’t be the first holidaymaker to run into problems at the car rental desk, and you certainly won’t be the last. Truth be told, I find hiring a car quite stressful. My husband and I are always on the alert for some way the rental company might stitch us over. That could be trying to flog us unnecessary insurance, using scare tactics to up-sell us, giving us a smaller vehicle or charging a massive fee if we return the car slightly late.
And of course, there’s the worry you might damage the car, or the rental firm tries to make you pay for an existing scratch or dent. Always meticulously check the car before accepting it, taking photos and a video.
In terms of your problem, as you say, flight delays are unavoidable. You and your wife were looking forward to a two-week break exploring the Douro Valley. I asked whether you had told Green Motion you’d be late collecting the car, but you said you hadn’t, although you had checked the office’s opening hours. It was open until 9pm so you thought that was fine, and you said it had never crossed your mind your booking could be cancelled due to exceeding a grace period.
You did, sensibly, print out the car hire policy when you arranged the rental on Booking.com. However, you only read it after you were late to Green Motion’s office and had to cough up more than €500 for another car. Buried on page four of the policy was the stipulation the customer had to collect the car at the “scheduled pick up time”.
In Portugal, the company holds reservations for two hours (the grace period), after which they will be classed as a no-show, and cancelled. The terms and conditions add: “In the event of a no-show, the booking is non-refundable.”
You had agreed to these conditions, but felt they were unfair and unreasonable. “If I choose or am unable to show up at a given time, it’s still my vehicle, hired and paid for, and it should be there for me to pick up even a few hours later,” you argued.
I asked Green Motion about its policy. Was this a reasonable rule, and was it clearly communicated to customers? It quickly looked into what had happened on your Porto trip.
It said the cancellation of your booking was correctly triggered by your “non-announced late arrival”, and the Porto office “operated within the agreed terms and conditions”.
In terms of fairness, the company explained that vehicle fleets are managed very tightly and in the event of a no-show, the vehicle is released for resale to recover lost revenue. But this seemed nonsensical as you had already paid for the car (and were denied a refund), so there was no loss of revenue.
However, Green Motion clarified that when a car rental is made via a third-party aggregator – in your case, Booking.com – and there’s a no-show, the aggregator does not pay the car rental supplier. “Thus, the drive by the operator to re-rent the vehicle out if possible,” Green Motion added.
Having said all that, Green Motion offered to make a goodwill gesture and refund you the €582.20 for the Citroën C4.
A spokesman said: “We will also offer [the reader] a week’s car hire at any of our locations across the world free of charge to allow [him] to hopefully have an uninterrupted experience of our services.
“We will also make a donation equivalent to the refunded charge of €582.20 on [the reader’s] behalf to our local chosen charity, UnityMK which helps homeless people in Milton Keynes (close to our international head office).”
I thought this was very generous, and you were delighted to accept the offer. I pressed Green Motion on whether it makes customers sufficiently aware of the time window to collect their vehicle. To make matters more confusing, each Green Motion location can set its own grace period. In the UK, it’s four hours whereas in Greece it’s 2.5 hours.
The company agreed that collection times and grace periods were important information to highlight to customers, and said it would “consider whether there are further opportunities to work with our broker partners to give information such as this greater prominence”.
It is cases like this that reinforce the need to take a belt-and-braces approach to hiring a car. Carefully read the policy and terms and conditions beforehand, and contact the firm if you’ll be late collecting or dropping off the vehicle.
– Ruth
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