Giorgio cavallo

Review of Affordable Car Hire

We used our TESCO Club card points to hire a car i...

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.



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!