There is little I can say that hasn't already been violently shrieked into the face of the wretched…read moredemon spawn Goldcar calls its employees a thousand times before. Then again, I'm far too miffed to say nothing, so here goes.
Goldcar are thieves, plain and simple. I didn't think they were. I thought the majority of negative reviews out there were hyperbolic, or perhaps written by customers who'd just had exceptionally bad luck. I was quite wrong.
My girlfriend and I, along with every single other passenger on our flight, were - and I do not use this word lightly - extorted into paying sometimes obscene amounts of money to Goldcar to get cars we had already pre-paid in full. And for every single one of us, Goldcar told a different lie (often contradicting previous lies) that found no support in their terms & conditions or any other form of rational reasoning known to man.
During the booking process (about a month before our vacation) I had input my flight details as part of the rental process. According to the rental form, this was to ensure Goldcar would be notified in the event of our flight being delayed. And what luck, because our flight was indeed delayed; by 190 minutes no less! Of course, to be sure we got our car I had also notified Goldcar directly before take-off as soon as we were told about the delay - just in case the flight number wasn't enough.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the hysterical, angry Italian creature who "greeted" us at the Pisa International Goldcar counter told us our car had already been rented to someone else, and that we would have to pay to upgrade to a more expensive car if we wanted a rental. I asked him how this was possible - after all I did give them our flight number AND contact them about the delay after all. He simply told us "Not my problem.". When I insisted we get the car we booked, or at least something similar, he said "Okay, then I cancel your booking!" and hand gestured as if tearing the contract apart.
I was dumbfounded...only in writing had I heard of people like this. People so wholly committed to being an absolute they appear entirely immune to all logic. You've signed a contract? Doesn't matter! You quote their own terms and conditions? He doesn't care! You try holding him to something he told you not ten seconds earlier? He's already forgotten it.
At this point the Italian demon-being behind the counter was quickly becoming so aggressive and threatening it was beginning to worry the other customers. Realizing this wasn't a person that could be reasoned with, I politely informed him I would record the remainder of our conversation, since I would need it for documentation with my travel insurance company (and because I knew what he was doing wasn't exactly legal). This was a YUGE mistake - the Italian man got *very* upset, threw my contract down on the counter and ran out of the room in a huff faster than you can spell linguini.
When he returned ten minutes later I'd begun to feel so bad for the twenty people behind me and, realizing this wasn't an argument I could win, thought I might as well just pay the money and get it over with. As I signed the contract, I saw that I wasn't paying for an upgrade at all! In fact I was getting THE EXACT CAR I HAD BOOKED, only with an extra fee added for "GPS rental"! Wonderful, another lie. Not wanting to spend the vacation in jail on manslaughter charges, I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull, swiped my credit card and got on our way.
...but of course it wasn't over yet.
You see, Goldcar not only pride themselves on criminally bad customer service, they also pride themselves on dead customers. I can see no other reason why our tires would have such wildly different pressures - the front left about to burst, the rear right nearly flat. Compared to this, the empty wiper fluid and defective GPS unit almost didn't bother me at all. So I pulled into a gas station and filled up the tires. After making sure there wasn't anything else Goldcar was doing to try to kill us, we were finally off to the hotel.
In the end, Goldcar lied about nearly everything, made threats and in the end gave us a dangerous car of a lower class than we had paid for with a non-functioning GPS we didn't want but were charged extra for.
We got off easy though. Our friends had to pay double their initial rental fee for extra insurance, as the Goldcar demon insisted their Norwegian insurance wasn't valid in Italy. This, of course, was a lie...
