[nordictat2girl]

Originally Posted by tspill

You are right - brokers can be cheaper. But The reason I dont use them is that they work on a very tight margin and can easily go bust - this happened a couple of years ago with one of the biggest ones. People were turning up at the car hire desks after long flights and there was no car for them as it hadn't been paid for by the agents. Getting their money back was a nightmare as insurance companies we're requiring formal letters of insolvency which they wouldn't supply.
This is unlikely to happen with the actual car hire companies themselves.
In about the last 15 hires I have done - alamo brits has come put cheapest every single time.
So for me, there is a big difference between agents and the actual hire companies. Also I generally don t like agents of any kind. They have to be paid. If their prices are cheaper of the same something must be missing - maybe in service - I don't know.
I generally ail only use an agent for car hire ig it is a last minute thing where these is less chance of this happening.

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Well that is not nice to hear (your bad experience) but you have to remember it's all about competition.
The prices car rental brokers offer also follows such trend. However because a broker first rents large volume of rental cars from the suppliers, the prices it gets are much lower than what a customer can get. As a result it is able to offer customers cheaper rates. Very importantly, cheaper doesn’t mean the quality is any lower, because you still have the car from suppliers like Hertz, Avis, Alamo, etc.

Plenty of us have used these car hire companies and brokers MANY, MANY times and NOT one of them are perfect. There is always going to be someone who runs into a problem while others have had nothing but good experiences.

If you want to rent through the main website that is your choice but don't try to scare people into thinking if they book thru Auto Europe, Usrentacar etc that they could not get a car when they show up! It's stressful enough trying to plan and make sure everything goes ok for our holidays...last thing a person needs to worry if they have a car when they show up. This isn't Spain!