Proceed with Caution

I hired a vehicle from this company on two separate weeks between August and October 2024. The second was extended to ten days. The first went off without incident.

The second however finished very badly. I handed back the vehicle (a Nissan Tiida - as was the first one, not incidentally the vehicle I had requested) on the morning of Thursday 17 October and hired an Uber taxi to the airport to catch a flight to London via Istanbul. I was at the car hire office for around 15 minutes until the taxi arrived. At no time was any inspection of the vehicle undertaken or offered before I left the premises.

I was therefore very surprised to find out in Istanbul airport that I'd been charged for an entire new rear bumper out of my deposit at some point when I was airborne over the African continent without any supporting evidence at the time.

I didn't have any sort of accident during my hire of the vehicle. It has been suggested to me that someone might have backed into me when I wasn't in it. Entirely possible but hard enough to require an entire new rear bumper?? The paperwork that was handed over to me at the start of the hire included recognition of previous "scratches on rear bumper". I signed for that.

In subsequent correspondence with the company I was informed that it isn't their policy to go over the car immediately after the hire, while the customer is still on the premises, and look for any further damage but only consider this after it's been washed. Well, in my opinion that's daft and completely at odds with any previous experience I've had with car hire companies anywhere in the world. I don't know about other companies in South Africa but here in the UK I deal with Enterprise who absolutely insist that all this sort of thing is sorted out at the time via a joint inspection. So failure to do that and that I consequently only found out about it when I was in Istanbul has directly led to my criticisms here.

It has been suggested to me that the damage might have been too minor for me to notice. Entirely true, so hard to equate that with the need for an entire new bumper then. And the car wasn't dirty at all. It had only been driven around Cape Town on tarmac roads.

The company subsequently provided me with before and after photographs. I accept that these are genuine and do show a difference but whether that was significant enough to require an entire new part how can I tell? At face value it doesn't look like it to me. They say otherwise. But how can I know? I wasn't consulted at the time which was I pity because otherwise I wouldn't have had cause to complain at all.