We Do Adventure

I’ve done a few name-and-shame posts in the past. This is the opposite. I’m going to kick off with a bit of credit-where-credit’s-due. Before our trip to the UK is asked some friends from my home town what local car rental companies they’d recommend. The response seemed to be that hiring from Gatwick Airport was the best option: it’s just down the road and we’d be flying in and out of there so it was convenient. Hertz were the cheapest for basic rental, although not necessarily for adding a second driver, so we made an online registration. When we came to pick up our Group B Fiesta or equivalent we discovered it had morphed into a Group C Focus, and at no extra costs. No complaints there! So after two weeks of racking up the miles around southern England I was beginning to wonder how things would be when I got back to driver on the right (or should that be right-hand side?) of the road. This is question everyone asks. How easy is it switching? Well, thankfully I’ve had no problems so f...

If you were to go to www.hyundai.ba you could make an online reservation for a hire car. However, I’m not sure I’d recommend it. Not that I don’t recommend hiring from Hyundai; I am a satisfied repeat customer. Let me tell yesterday’s tale and perhaps you’ll understand why I’m reticent to recommend online reservations. I walked into Hyundai’s rental car office at Mostar’s main station. The staff – in the singular – looked up from his desk and greeted me, in English. ‘I want to hire a car’ ‘When?’ ‘Ponedeljak...whole week’ ‘What car?’ ‘Getz’ Out came a classic Stabilo highlighter – fluorescent pink- to draw a neat line on the A4 schedule sitting on the desk. I spelt out my surname and and couple of little ‘8’s were scribbled at the beginning and end of the line – a record of our agreed pick-up and return times. And that was that. It is obvious it is the A4 paper schedules, not the computer, which governs what goes on in (or out) of the office. To use their website not only would run th...

I have a bad habit of leaving some things to the last minute. Those things usually include filling in forms or making phone calls. And so, needing to pick up a hire car for the weekend tomorrow it was only today did I get around to trying to organise this. In the UK this, I suspect, what not present much of an issue – I say I suspect as I’ve never actually hired a car myself in the UK. However, based on observation and my one experience of car hire – in Las Vegas – I decided that a well know franchise had to be the way to go. I’ve seen two names I recognised in Mostar: Budget and Sixt. Two things were not in Budget’s favour: the need for a bigger budget for the same class of rental and the fact they conspicuously decal their vehicles. The Sixt website came out with a better price but wasn’t clear on whether the car could be driven into Croatia. A local friend called to confirm it could and find the location of their office. It was not in Hotel Ero as they said. Nor was it in the office...