Alamo Car Hire www.alamo.co.uk

I rented a Luxury BMW 5 series or Audi A6 saloon car from Tampa Airport (USA) for 22 days and fully paid almost £1800 for this vehicle in advance of the hire period. When I arrived after spending nearly 2 hrs at the car depot they tried to palm me off with a lower cheaper class of car whilst charging the same amount!

Customer satisfaction is often measured by the overall experience the customer receives from the relationship with the service provider.

In this case, I would say this is the worse experience I have ever had from a car hire company. I would not be using or recommend any other person to hire a vehicle from a company which has a corporate policy that charges for a particular class of car but provides a much lower category than the customer paid for

R Miller

We reserved a car in UK at Glasgow Airport via booking.com. It was paid and confirmed.

But when we arrived to the Alamo counter, the representative run some kind of address check on my UK driver license, said that it does not go through, and refused to give me a car. We asked her to check my wife's DL and she said that it did not go through either. We called for the manager, but he said he cannot do anything. Our DL address is the house we own, where we lived for last 13 years, and we never had any issue with any checks before.

Note also that our DVLA check went through with no problem, and Alamo terms and conditions do not mention ANY additional checks.

We were forced to turn to another company (SIXT) across the hall. It had no issue with our DL addresses, checks etc and gave us a car, but we had to pay twice more.

Absolutely awful service from USA Alamo. Returned from a trip renting a car from these clowns. To get double charged on tolls. We'd paid cash and they charged our card too.

Sarcastic replies and no refund.

Just awful. Sure they run fine and get ok reviews if no help is needed

Try having an issue and getting it resolved- good luck.

It was my second time rent a car by Alamo. And i was very happy with my rental car which was upgarated free of charge. Rental price and service was amazing.

We were struggling with our car rental, Alamo went above and beyond to help us put the car we needed. He provided excellent customer service and is a credit to Alamo.

I rented a car with total cover insurance and when I arrived in the airport the rental company said to me that the total cover was not valid for them so I needed to pay it twice. Since I was traveling for almost two days I didn't want problems so I thought to solve it later. None of 2 companies made a refund. discovercars or Alamo.

Very disappointing indeed

We are experienced travellers and often use companied such as Almo when renting vehicles abroad. We are perfectly accustomed to not receiving the vehicle listed on the web site so that is not a problem. What is a problem is being offered only an automatic transmission when we have requested a manual. We are from the UK, where very few vehicles have automatic transmissions and when we specifically ask for a manual we expect to receive one. The model, make, engine size and everything else is adaptable, the transmission absolutely not so!

On this occasion, my wife was extremely upset at the offer of an automatic transmission. She protested at the time but was offered no alternatives. It was a ‘take it or leave it’ situation. It was a Sunday and we had plans so she felt compelled to accept. It took her a full week of our 2-week holiday to get accustomed to it. In the meantime, we altered our plans as we had long haul drives planned which we were compelled to change as my wife was feeling ill-accustomed to the car – especially its lack of responsiveness (manual drivers will know what we mean by this). We also spent a great deal more on petrol that we would have – had we been provided with a manual vehicle as requested.

Upon complaining to Alamo, we were phoned by a representative who offered a 50% reduction on the basis of our account that it took a full week of our 2-week holiday to grow accustomed to the car. Although this did not account for the additional petrol costs, we accepted. Around 15 minutes later he phoned back to say that he had spoken to his manager and the offer was now a non-negotiable 15% which, frankly, is derisory.

Since then we have tried and tried (in vain) to get a response, any response, from Alamo customer services. They tend to send pleasant sounding emails initially promising their attention, before then failing to communicate with us. On one occasion we were promised a call from the management at Limoges airport to agree a resolution. That call was never received. Very poor service. A company without a customer service spirit or inclination. My advice would be to avoid them.

We were given a damaged car, but told this damage was too small to be registered. Upon returning the car, the young manager there told us this was fine, we would not be charged for the damage, and refunded our deposit. One month later a huge bill for nearly £900 arrived. Our queries were stonewalled, and we were treated appallingly. More customers need to make official complaints to stop this from happening again and again. I am still reeling from this experience, and will not give up until this matter is resolved satisfactorily.

Excellent recent experience.

The person I dealt with and the front desk team were friendly, efficient and got us on the road quickly.

Would highly recommend them .

Thanks guys

The Alamo car rental pick up at LAX was machine only. I was given the impression that I had opted to pay for a full tank of gas for which I thought I was being charged $39 - I had a receipt to say that this would be taken off my credit card. But no money was taken off until return when they took over $55 despite there being gas left in the tank. This is deceptive and can only be accomplished with a machine operated system when you cant ask questions. The operative who was supposed to be helping us to use the machines was hostile and impatient and at one point actually put in information for me that was knowingly inaccurate saying that 'they dont care' and I just needed 'to hurry up'.

When we selected the cars, we were told to ‘pick any car’ no one checked the vehicle nor told us anything about how to operate the car – I couldn’t even start it without help from another customer.

When we returned the car, they trust the tiny-print receipt in my hand and ordered me move away and get into the queue for the shuttle - refused to give me time to read the receipt let alone answer any queries.

I would advise everyone to avoid them. There is NO customer service. The staff seem trained to AVOID helping you to understand and are presumably paid to move everything as quickly as possible regardless. You have no comeback if you dont understand what youre being asked to do.