Car rental deposit woes

[Will Gill]

Morning,

Whilst enjoying my hols with the 'fam in France we rented a car (Qashqai), a very uneventful and boring rental/car experience and I returned the car as I found it, I even topped up the tank coz I'm nice.

They took a seemingly hefty deposit of €2500 but unlike other car rentals there was nowhere to pay a bit extra to reduce this excess, anyway, I paid it didn't think much about it, until now, nearly two weeks later I'm still 2.5k out of pocket and the vendor/rental company claim the refund takes 30 days to be processed. That sounded a little retarded (time wise) so I spoke to my bank, who have further worried me by saying this could take up to 12 weeks to resolve, irksome.

I've done my google and chatgpt sleuthing and not returned a vast amount of info, I just wondered if you fine marques might have any experience with such matters? or am I being petty and should I simply let time resolve my qualms?

Here are pictures for your amusement and reference:




P.S. Their head office is in france which is rather a long distance to go and poo in the their letter box

 

[Will Gill]

yeah fair point, my annoyance with this company clouded my judgement and my bank (monzo) gave me no other obvious option to query the transaction

I've never ever experienced this kind of delay fpr preauthed payments. Be it hotels, car rental etc..and was hoping for other experiences confirming or denying

 

[Will Gill]

If that's the case. So be it, I'll just wait however long it takes. Will be an unexpected Brucey bonus when it arrives.

Just amazed 30 days is acceptable. Is the refund provided via a post dated cheque?

 

[Will Gill]

2.5k in rental discount vouchers

 

[Will Gill]

Qashqai's rental cars are great fun, like bonking a fat girl, great fun till your mates see you in one!

 

[Will Gill]

Yeah they were nice enough but still insisted it was 30 days, which I found rather elongated and I resented them sitting on 2.5k gaining their own interest. So here we are. I guess they can sit on it for 12 weeks now instead, lesson learnt

I was more interested if this was the norm?

 

[Will Gill]

Surprised you didn't use your black amex, peasant.

I tried mate, it turns out they were the peasants.....

Lesson learned - do the deposit on your CC with highest available balance, and then take Car Excess Insurance for like £20 from carhireexcess.com

Way cheaper than paying those companies.

That would have been my amex mate which they didn't accept, to be quite honest I just grabbed another card and really didn't think about it as with every other deposit experience it's been credited back within 24 hours.

 

[Will Gill]

pre-auth doesn't take the money, but holds it to be pulled down later. They don't 'have' it as such but have access to it. The issue here is probably that they've set the auth period too long (maybe 30 days) so it won't release until that time has passed.
In theory the merchant (hire company) can cancel that auth, but most don't know they can, or how to. I'm suprised Monzo have opened a chargeback if it is an auth, but afraid you'll have to wait on it.

(Just be thankful thats all your only problem, my Dad had a hire car in Italy a good while ago, Herz told the Carabinieri he was responsible for a speeding ticket two weeks after he got back, in an entirely different region. Hertz wouldn't admit their mistake and then were completely unhelpful trying to get it resolved with the authorities. In the end, on the advise of some Italian friends he just paid the fine then spent the best part of a year getting the money back from Hertz)

This is my point, they have taken the money and it's 100% missing from my bank account, you can see it here along with the actual rental amount:

 

[Will Gill]

Yeah its a PITA with Monzo cards. I got caught in Oman with a massive deposit fee for the whole crews hotel rooms not leaving enough available balance to actually pay the hotel bill.

It wasn't like I'd just played the "it'll be fine boys, we've got loads of time to get to the airport" card and left it a little tight with our return flight... oh wait. I did.

Still, not like we finally got the other side of the airport to the final security check then realised the hire car key was still in my pocket... oh no, that's right... I did that as well

Thank you, that's exactly what I didn't want to hear but kind of expected, so it's more than likely Monzo who are the numpties in this scenario

I don't use monzo, but does the fact that its grey'd not mean its a hold? If you go into it does it provide any more detail?

Nah that's the same colour for all payments, otherwise my expensive meal at the bottom would have been on hold too

 

[Will Gill]

ah I apologise, I was looking at the GBP value colour, yeah it does appear to be different, makes no difference to the dent in my current account

 

[Will Gill]

Expect Monzo to close your account with that claim now.

I'd be amazed, but hey ho if they do

 

[Will Gill]

Yeah I do agree with what you are saying and I've heard a few stories myself, but usually for matched betting and foreign payments etc.. like I said if they do they do, I'd have 60 days to move to wherever I like, would be a shame I quite like the max benefits, but hey ho.

 

[Will Gill]

Not sure why a deposit is such an issue. Pay on a CC and get carehireexcess.com.

Hindsight is always 20/20 'aint it

Of course if I'd planned to rent a car, I'd have done it all very differently, for a start I'd have rented something decent and done it all through one of many credit cards, got zero excess and ensured a free packet of haribo...

However

In this case, the deposit was absolutely an issue, the RR I was using, true to JL form; just died, luggage spread across two properties and time against us, so we had to rent a car in a hurry, in the middle of basically nowhere (periguex), the only company with anything available that day were ADA so I booked an old school taxi (uber quoted 118 minutes!), I only had my phone on me which has my physical amex in it and my debit cards on it for backup. They don't accept amex so I had to use my debit card on my phone. Oddly I'd tried to add two of my credit cards to my phone and they didn't work, sucks to be with Coutts, they really went downhill when they stopped being the 'Queens bank'.....:


So yeah, it was a full on western (super mare)