We had booked the car on the Internet with the company "Top Car" (top-car-hire.com). When we wanted to collect the car, we were, however, sent to the counter of the company "Auto Reisen" (www.autoreisen.es).

We don't quite understand the connection between the two companies, but apparently different companies like "Top Car" or "Low Cost Car" are a kind of broker which don't possess own cars but pass on the contract to "Auto Reisen", which then provides the car.

We received the booking confirmation from "Top Car", while we closed the deal on the airport with "Auto Reisen".

The booking procedure per se was unbureaucratic: we just had to fill in a web form and wait for the confirmation e-mail.

We gave the bad mark because there's apparently an error in the booking process: We received just one booking confirmation, but on the airport they wanted to deliver two cars. They said we had booked two cars (see below)

Apparently we had a bad-hair day...

Originally we had booked the car for 12 o'clock. Our flight, however, arrived early (something that happens rarely enough). Thus we had left the terminal already at 11:00 am and would have liked to collect the rental car at that time. The lady at the counter of Auto Reisen gave us short shrift. She took the e-mail confirmation, threw a glance on it, circled the time 12:00 and said "Come back in an hour". That's not what we wanted and so we asked again if we could collect the car earlier. "No". As we learned from the discussion, they didn't have a single car of our category in stock - all of them were hired and they first had to wait for a passenger of a plane departing at 12 o'clock return the car before they could give it to us.

Well, if the price is so cheap it's probably normal that the cars have to be used to full capacity - thus we forgot about the question if someone would inspect the car between two customers and waited another hour at the airport. After all, we didn't want to spoil the beginning of our holidays...

At 12 o'clock the farce went on: It was then when we learned that we had booked two cars. Well, what were we going to do with two SEAT Cordoba with a total of four children's seats? The lady behind the counter didn't know it either, according to her list we were to receive two cars. It took some time until we could explain to her that this had to be a mistake. She then wanted to know why we hadn't reacted when we had received the confirmation. We surely would have if we had gotten two confirmations...but we hadn't, and so how should we know that the system had booked two cars for us? This argument made sense to the lady and so we agreed on just one car with two child seats.

When we wanted to name my wife as a second driver, however, the next discussion began. According to the renting conditions on the web site of Top Car, this is possible without any extra costs - the lady behind the counter, however, didn't know about it. She said that this is only the case when booking with "TUI Cars", with any other company it's an extra 2.50 Euro per day. We were confused. The statement that the car rental violates the contract in doing so didn't interest the lady. If we didn't want to pay, she wouldn't write a second driver in the contract. If we didn't agree we should write an e-mail and point out the error on the web site. Well, it's not really a customer's duty to take care about the correctness on a provider's homepage (by now, the mistake was corrected even without an e-mail from us). As already mentioned above, we didn't want to spoil the beginning of our holidays and so we didn't argue any more about the issue.

Then the lady came with two raised seats for our two kids (2 and 4 years old). We are a little irritated and asked her if she didn't have a proper child seat instead of a raised seat for the little one. No, this was what we had reserved and if we didn't agree we just would have had to fill in the form correctly. A glance at the booking confirmation showed that we indeed had filled in the form correctly: "1 child seat" and "1 raised seat". In the area for comments we even had mentioned the age of the children in two languages (English and German) in order to make clear which kind of seats we need - the lady shortly thought it all over and then said that in Spain it is also allowed for a two-year-old to sit in a raised seat. Well, as I said before we didn't want to spoil the beginning of our holidays but we didn't want to bargain about our children's safety. Thus we explained in a few words that we wanted the ordered child seat, no matter what the Spanish law says. The lady reacted surprisingly: she didn't have to put up with that and she wanted to stop the renting process. Thus we had to apologise before she is willing to eventually give us the car - and behold, suddenly she even brings a children's seat...

At last we held the car key in our hands and could go to the parking lot number 10, where our car was parked.

Summary: Low-priced company, but next time we'll pay a little more and choose a more professional company.

yes

45'000 km, many marks on all sides but clean.
There was no one on the parking lot whom we could have shown the marks before the departure, and we didn't want to return to the terminal. Thus we took pictures of all sides.

-

Credit card - unbureaucratic, no deposit

no

unfriendly

yes

didn’t need one

yes
25 Years

yes

3 year

yes

2,50 € per day

don’t know

no

don’t know