Zest Car Rental
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Flawed Zest service only as good as its "trusted partners"
Our previously trusted car hire broker service, Zest Car Rental, is only as good as its weakest providers. Do your own research as, in the case of Green Motion, it is leading its customers to the door of this poorly-rated and unscrupulous provider. Upon our arrival at Green Motion's Rhodes branch - a few miles from Rhodes Airport - myself and my brother-in-law (at separate desks, with separate staff) were told that the all-inclusive, comprehensive cover provided by Zest (including its optional top up cover) would not provide any cover in Rhodes. Without a cursory glance at the Zest Rental document we were both told "We can cancel you booking, and you can walk away, or you can take our insurance". With a family group of 13 - including children aged 6, 8 and 12 - stood on the pavement outside, with no where to go after their delayed five-hour flight we had little choice. The cost of Green Motion's cover? Over £400, almost doubling the cost of our initial rental of a car and nine-seat people carrier. Plus, £100 deposits on each vehicle. Reasoning that we would take the matter up with Zest when we returned to the UK, we were shown to two vehicles in very poor condition. Dirty, dented and downright dangerous. The people carrier, a high mileage Opel Vivaro, had no functioning air con. The "Hyundai i30 or equivalent" was a high-milage Vauxhall Astra with a faulty drivers' seatbelt, which would not retract, hanging limply over my torso. The Green Motion operative told me "It is fine" as he attempted top feed the belt into the car's B-pillar with his fingers. However, after arguing that it was extremely unsafe, and the Vivaro unsuitable for a family to use in a hot climate for a week, we were swapped into other vehicles. The paperwork was hurriedly amended in biro for the car, with no such effort made for the van. Was this legal? Would we be insured? We weren't sure. The vehicles we were moved into were two more high-milage examples (How is Green Motion green?); a Renault Megane Estate with doors which only occasionally locked (it turned out) and a Ford Transit. Both, thankfully, worked fine during our trip. However, we spent our Rhodes holiday anxious about being ripped off for over £400 and about what the Green Motion staff might have in store for us on our return. Thankfully, despite being wholly dismissive of us on our return - striding away from us as we spoke to them and offering no assurance about the return of the deposits - we got our deposits back... Just the £400-odd pounds down then. I did take my case up with Zest when we got home. However, it wholly took the word of Green Motion when it responded that "the customer chose to receive full insurance directly with us". Are they mad?! When we went to Rhodes knowing Zest provided full cover?! Zest Car Rental, as such, offered zero support, thus ending my 10-plus years as a loyal customer and any trust I placed in it. In short, Zest had led me to the door of a provider which (I later discovered) has almost 30,000 reviews on TrustPilot, 33% of which are one-star rated. On the Zest website, it claims 3.94-stars. In short, book with Zest and you are as vulnerable as anyone to the immoral sales practices of car hire hire providers once you are overseas, with family, after a long flight, with nowhere else to turn. As such, Zest's "car rental you can trust", all-inclusive USP is a nonsense.