I would give zero stars if I could. I knew from the start of my interaction with EuropCar that I was getting scammed, and I fought against the scam for quite a while. While I was being scammed I witnessed other people arrive at the EuroCar office and get similarly scammed. But here's why EuropCar typically wears people like myself down, after a long flight with less sleep than I'm accustomed to getting and a two hour drive ahead of me, standing there with luggage....... All I really want to do is pick-up my car and go. Here's how the scam works:
You arrive to claim your car at the kiosk inside the terminal at the airport, Terminal 2 in my case. My reservation was for 181.39 euros not including full insurance. I wanted to be prudent and was planning on taking out full insurance so I figured when all was said and done the reservation would come to about 400 euros. They look up my reservation and Oh No! My reservation is for pick-up in another terminal, Terminal 1. But hold on, They'll check what's available at Terminal 2. Oh wouldn't you know it, stock is very low right now, especially for automatic transmission. But wait we do have two vehicles, one of which is diesel which will save you a lot of money on gas.... And that will be 800 euros.
After I said that was out of the question I asked if they could bring the car I reserved to Terminal 2 and they said they could but it would be an hour or more. And this is when I knew they had me. I did not want to wait another hour to get on the road and at this point I was concerned I would run into similar problems at the Terminal 1 office (I envisioned something like oh, it past your pick-up time and we gave your car away, but we have this 800 euro car for you) if I just decided to walk over there. To be fair, what I describe in the last sentence did not happen, but based on my experience thus far and watching everyone at the other window get the same scam run on them, I did not have much confidence in EuropCar at this point. I'll add that I picked this company because they are a European company with many locations (in case something happens during the rental) with a good reputation.
Needless to say after talking to his manager (eye-roll) the final price was 660 euro including full insurance and GPS. I will also add they said I could not rent the car without full insurance. I was going to get it anyway, but believed it to be optional (I really don't know if it is or not for foreigners).
I checked with my travel agent when I returned home and he confirmed when making the booking there is not a specific terminal specified, the system just says pick-up in terminal. A non-related gripe is also that the numbered spots to pick up the car are not clearly labeled and employees provide little guidance; a map of the parking spots given out at the office would be helpful I think. I did not have any issues returning the car.
In conclusion, while I do not know if every location of EuropCar employs scammers, I can certainly attest that the Barcelona airport location at Terminal 2 does. read more