Affordable Car Hire

Still waiting for a refund from last April !!

We used our TESCO Club card points to hire a car in Italy (Naples). Tesco’s use Affordable Car Hire as a broker for car hire abroad. Affordable Car Hire booking process was straight forward and easy. We choose Firefly as the car rental company. We paid £48 for a 3 day hire for a middle range car with 5 doors. We paid a further £49 for the Super Max insurance. On the day of collection/pickup, we were told that our Credit card transaction was declined. 3 hours later after talking to the credit card people Visa and Mastercard as well as trying to understand the reason for the problem with FireFly we concluded that FireFly car rental use an unsafe practice/method of blocking the vehicle damage charge amount to your card. Basically, FireFly type in the info from your credit card onto the PC system, when they should be using a card machine. So our only option we thought was to use a different car hire company that had a card reader. We spoke with Affordable Car Hire and they said that they could create a new booking, but we would lose the amount already paid. Errrr!! We tried our luck and asked FireFly to use our debit card… Hurray!! It worked. Although the contract clearly states that you have to have a Credit card. The car we received was a Fiat 500… which we would not class as a mid range car with 5 doors. We did finally set off with a larger car but the whole process took nearly four hours and 4 years of my life! In summary: Make sure you have… A valid driving licences. A valid passport. A valid Credit card of which the credit card company knows that you are going abroad. And most of all… Make sure your car hire company have a credit/Debit card reader! Finally. Make sure you take a good look under your car prior to taking it. We heard one guy being charged a £600 for a bolt being ripped out underneath of which he had no idea about. and... Make sure the inside of your car is clean on return, or they will charge you ~£45 to have it cleaned.

This company is a con. We booked car hire for Australia for £252 and paid upfront, consequently receiving a confirmation email confirming that no balance was now due. When I collected the car, the hire company (Thrifty, Hervey Bay) advised that payment hadn’t been made and I needed to pay a deposit and a further £336 for the car hire. I was in a rush and stupidly paid this and said I would have to check later but was sure I had paid something to Affordable Car Hire already. I later checked to find that I had paid for it already, so I had now paid £252 upfront to Affordable, plus £336 to Thrifty plus £211 deposit to Thrifty! I called Affordable and explained this and the lady was very patronising, she stated that the payment I made was for the hire but excluded the “one way fee” (which actually turned out to be more than the hire itself), she said she was unsure how I hadn’t read that on the voucher... She said this was stated on a voucher, a voucher received AFTER I had made the payment for the hire to them initially! She had no empathy and really didn’t care at all. So car hire that we thought would cost £250 has now turned into £600, plus fuel costs and additional excess insurance that we took out. If we knew all of this we would have booked a flight instead which would have been easier and cheaper..! Based on my brief experience with your customer service it seems unlikely, but should anyone from Affordable want to contact me about this my reservation number is ACH-2-274592-49.

absolutely to be avoided at all costs, turned up a bit late to be told my car had been hired to someone else although i had hired it for 2 days! they were so rude, went to Hertz who gave me a free upgrade as they didnt have the car i had asked for and so pleasant.... this company NEVER AGAIN!

We have used this company[affordable car hire] at least once a year for the last seven years with no problems whatsoever and can recommend them highly.