After my wife and I got married a couple of years ago, we went back to the US to visit her family. Landing at Dulles airport in Washington DC, we had prebooked a car for 7 days online, that according to the website was going to cost us $280 – which I thought was a great deal.

However once we landed in the US and had spent 2 hours lining up at immigration, we finally made it to the Enterprise Car Rental place. They quickly found our booking and then they added up the “extras” that conveniently were not added on the website and suddenly our $280 rental was going to cost over $1200 dollars.  We could not afford that and so we had a huge dilema about what we would do for transport for the week,

I hugely disapprove of that kind of marketting on a website – and I know they could argue that there are other terms and conditions – but the reality of this is that it is not helping the customer at all. At best it is misleading – what is the point?

It is not useful for anyone to have a quote that is wrong, which is why I am grateful that now in the European Union all flight prices on websites have to include all costs – so that you do not buy a £1 ticket that in reality costs you £29. I just wish that the US car rental firms would take a leaf out of the airlines book and stop being misleading!