Car rental nightmare - OK Mobility Malaga

[cakehoover123]

We booked a five-day car rental in April with OK Mobility in Malaga. They seemed like a reputable company, with a desk in the airport.

During the rental we drove an hour to a friend's villa, parked the car (behind locked gates and security) and apart from one short afternoon trip, stayed put. When we got back to the OK Mobility desk we dropped the keys at the desk, which they seemed unhappy about. We video'd the exterior, but stupidly didn't take a photo of the dashboard.

The same day we got a credit card fraud warning for an attempted charge of €940 from OK Mobility, and later the same day another €940 from a company with a different name. We blocked the payments, thought "that's odd" but didn't think anything more of it as we knew there wasn't a problem with the car.

Two days later OK Mobility mailed us to say the car mileometer showed that we'd exceeded our rental mileage allowance by 5559km(!!) and they would be charging us €1437(!!!).

We wrote back and said this was a mistake, we'd barely driven, please could they check their systems? They wrote a long confused email acknowledging an error in the previous renter's mileage but not in ours. We asked them to check again, but they didn't reply.

Now I've seen that OK Mobility have charged our card £351.88. I asked why. They did not explain, but just said the bill of €1437 is with their legal team, and they will be pursuing us for non-payment! 😱

This is a nightmare. Obviously we didn't drive 5550 km, and I know the car wasn't stolen because it was behind locked gates the entire time! What can I do?

Can you contact your credit card company, explain the problem and see if they can do anything via a Section 75 claim?

OK Mobility is claiming you drove an excess mileage of 5500km in 5 days, which would certainly be going some on top of your included mileage (I’m guessing you didn’t drive to Berlin and back), so explain why that’s impossible / clearly a mistake and that you’ve raised it with OK Mobility and not had a satisfactory reconciliation.

Also flag up the €940 unaccounted for charges from OK Mobility and same fee from the unknown company that you blocked, and the £351.88 charge for ??? to your card company, as these don’t tally with the stated excess mileage fee and you haven’t received any information about what these charges are for.

I would also work out (from Google maps) the distance that you had done to
point out that you were within your included km.

Just ask your credit card company to cancel the additional charge. My DSis did this when she had a bogus charge added to a foreign car rental by the rental company, and never heard from them again. That much extra mileage in just 5 days would put you driving at least 10 hours every day. How many miles were included in the rental originally?

I would also think that rental cars have trackers on them so they know you didn’t drive it much anyway.

Thanks for the advice. Our credit card company is HSBC, I've raised it with them (which wasn't easy in itself!) and included my Google Maps timeline.

I'm hoping the legal threat is an empty one.

What a horrible company - I wonder how many people they have bullied into giving them money!

I usually do the car hire bookings but delegated it once to DH and it was OK Mobility that he booked. Hard sell at the collection desk to try to get us to upgrade and then cross border fees on top for going from Portugal to Spain. I'd also read horror stories about customers being charged for scratches in hard to see places like underneath the bumpers so spent a long, long time crawling round the car to get photos of everything.

I've started booking with Zest, a UK broker, that includes excess waiver in the price. Zest's customer service is also very good, and they tend to use the big name car hire companies, so next time I'd take a look at them.