Keep your fingers from this scam company
TL;DR: Procar is effectively scamming its customers. Get your car from one of the big players instead!
Recently two good friends of mine, Melanie and David, my wife Ida and I went to a trip to Iceland. Looking forward to spend 11 days with a rented SUV and driving across this beautiful country for ~900 € sounded like a super deal for us. Well, it was too good to be true.
The warning signs started as soon as we arrived at the airport. After going through baggage claim and entering the arrival hall we were told that a guy from Procar will show up and shuttle us to our car as their office was located outside the airport areal. So far so good. But there was no Procar guy, and for the next 45 minutes nothing was going to change about that. Which was fine for me personally at the time as I got a little snack. Looking back however, having to wait for 45 minutes after a 4 h flight isn’t cool, even with a little snack in your hands. (And the others did not get any snacks!) So after arrival David looked around for the Procar guy for a while, we all then marched to the rented car shuttle bay including all our baggage just to be told that Procar isn’t part of this service. After heading back (and getting the fore mentioned snack), asking more people and waiting even longer one Procar guy finally showed up. Apologies? Zero. Any info why it took them so long? Nada. It took us 5 minutes to the office.
The office was spot on, clean, modern, had free WI-FI, chargers for mobile phones and a free coffee machine serving a selection of freshly grounded good-tasting coffee. That is the end of the positive stuff.
After presenting our pre-paid voucher (from another company) to one of the guys at the desk we were being told that our designated driver, David, has to provide additional 2.600 € per credit card block for insurance besides the insurance that was already included in our deal. And not only that, the amount could only be blocked on David’s credit card! No other card was accepted, neither another payment method, which was super weird. As there was no way to change the credit card limit to the ridiculous high amount of an additional 2.600 € on a Saturday (David even tried it on the phone), the only other way to get to our car and getting our road trip finally started was to pay a ~400 € upfront insurance to Procar. So long, 900 € road trip!
Confronted by all this I started to look up Procar reviews on the internet. And **** I wish we had done this earlier. There are tons and tons of bad reviews on Procar. Exactly the same experience as ours, paying ridiculous amounts of money for alleged new dints in the car finish that existed in the first place or paid removal of bad user reviews on various review platforms. All the stuff you don’t want to know about a company you’re going to make a contract with. One positive thing I need to mention however, is the fact that the guys at the Procar office are really good at scamming people. I mean they are really multitasking, they did exactly the same scam on a Spanish couple on the desk left to us as we were talking! However, Procar, if you want one advice on how to improve your service, please train your people to not smirk the whole time and use better excuses than “there is absolutely no other way”!
So yeah, bye bye, 900 € road trip! Melanie was so kind to pay the ~400 € insurance upfront to finally get away from these people. After reading all the bad reviews (and because of common sense and experiences in the past) I went outside to film and document all dints and chips in the finish and windshields of the car. Interestingly the Procar guys inside joked about not to worry about any damages as long as the car is still rolling after return.
We got the keys and started our road trip…
Full stop! Melanie was just entering the car as she got a second text confirmation about a ~400 € transaction! And it definitely wasn’t the same confirmation twice as the first included a different remaining amount in the last sentence. These ****** tried to rip us off just after all the troubles! And yeah I was pissed! After confronting them about this, they came up with flimsy excuses like this happens as their bank needs to reserve the amount before fetching it. 🐮💩! Or that the first transaction wasn’t going through at all. 🐮💩!! David told me that their terminal, for what ever reason, just didn’t work the first time, and so they just started over. The even presented and printed a transaction log including only one transaction from Melanie to them. I rushed outside to get clean air and call my colleague Mike, who is always here when I need a second opinion! And btw, thanks for that Mike!
Mike was also suspecting fraud, called them a name 😉 and advised me to call the emergency number of the credit card and to document the outside and the interior of the car and filming my watch just in case they won’t accept the first video without a timestamp in it. I went inside, got a roll of (cheap) TP from the toilet and wiped off all the remaining rain drops (as it had rained during our landing) from the car. And thank God I did this. There where a lot more of dints and chips I could document!
In the meantime Melanie was able to contact the emergency number of her credit card company and they confirmed the suspicion! Indeed there were two transactions with the same amount! But we need to wait for Monday to fix this!
To be continued?
