France Voila Newsletter #44 November 23 2000

This week

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1. Car Rental Problems in Europe

In my last newsletter I wrote about our own experience with a excess insurance trick which Europcar tried to make. I have had a big response from readers about a number of frauds and tricks from various car rental companies in Europe. I have also received some letters which have praised and recommended other companies and agencies.

I am very interested to hear of any more instances of both and good and bad behavior from car rental companies.

In my case I wrote to the agency I booked through, "Autoeurope". I immediately received this mail from their President..

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Dear Tony I read your note with great attention .. Although on vacations , Steve grant, my VP MIS made sure it is forwarded to me .. He , as much as myself feel that your comments are very important to us .

Regarding The Europcar issue , I have heard several complaints from other clients this year regarding the damages charges ..and those complaints were also directed to other suppliers we use such as Avis or National .. it looks like a bad fever spreading over European car rentals looking for an abusive way to charge our clients as much as their own clients .. Since the general trend in the car rental industry is decreasing rates for competitive reasons , they are looking for unlawful income to compensate their pricing decrease ..

I DO NOT AGREE WITH THEM and we at Autoeurope are ready to fight for each customer .. case by case .. Please feel free to send me any complaint to me personally and I promise to deal with it to our customer satisfaction ..

Imad Khalidi (President AutoEurope)

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I am preparing a dossier to sent on to Mr Khalidi and will add any other cases of abuse from car rental firms you wish to send me. I happen to have a journalist from California staying with us and I know that several of you are also professional journalists and writers. It seem that the public is being "ripped off" by some car rental firms and there is a case for a campaign to bring this to the attention of the publi

At the very least is should be possible to get a simple price for a car rental to enable a comparison from one agency to another. A quote is meaningless if you then have to add compulsory insurance and other legally obligatory charges to it. It is like buying a car and then having to pay extra for wheels and an engine.

Here is another case of "less than fair" tactics used, Veronica booked a car through our site from TravelNow..

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Dear Tony, Well you asked for car hire horror stories so here's one -- it's not a horror story exactly, just a salutary warning not to believe everything you read! We've just been to the UK for a week and I used the Travel Now link from your site to book a hire car. Their site quoted 79 pounds for a week, for a "compact" car (i.e. a Vauxhall Astra) from Alamo. Now, I'm not that gullible, so I assumed there were going to be some hidden extras such as CDW (collision damage waiver) etc. These weren't mentioned either on the site or in the confirmation email but I foolishly assumed based on previous experience that it would only add an extra 30 pounds or so, so it still looked like a good deal. Here's the breakdown of what we were actually charged (the insurance fees were all obligatory by the way). Incidentally, I am definitely not accusing you of misleading us, since the way Travel Now present information is nothing to do with you (I hope!).

• Car hire 78.19
• Premium location supplement 14.22
• Damage waiver 32.55
• 3rd party insurance 31.50
• RFT registration 6.65
• VAT 28.54
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• Total 191.65

plus deposits of 50 pounds for petrol and 300 pounds damage excess. We could have paid even more for optional insurance but declined. This puts the "bargain" in a somewhat different light! For comparison, last time I went I booked a car through Ryanair/Hertz and paid about 150 pounds. The man at the car hire desk said we were the 6th disgruntled Internet customer that day. Of course the hire co. isn't to blame either, except insofar as they are associating themselves with a website which is at best misleading, but their staff have to take the flak. I eventually found an anodyne statement in Travelnow's help pages to the effect that tax and insurance are not included in their rates but there's no indication of just how much these can be, or of how you can find out what they are! I'll complain to Travelnow, but I don't expect to get anywhere. Oh -- and to add injury to insult, on the last day of our visit someone smashed the rear window while the car was parked in a well-lit high street, so I expect we can wave byebye to the 300 pound deposit as well ... Apart from that we had a great time! Veronica

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Veronica has received a "less than satisfactory" response from Travel Now to her complaint one sentence (misspelt) saying...

---"We are sorry that you did not understand your rental however you had our email reply and could have ask for all the information. Linda C."---

I am taking all links to Travel Now off my sites.

Rather than fill up this newsletter with many other examples and letters I have received I have made an open forum page at...

http://goto-europe.com/carrental/forum.html

...where you can read some letters or post your own comments and experiences.

Please write to me about any unsatisfactory experience you have had with car rentals.

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2. Home Swaps

An excellent way of discovering a new country or another city is to exchange your home with someone. You can do this for weeks or months, it offers great savings and you will have real home accommodation.

One of the best sites I have found offering a service for you to find or to offer your home for exchange is Holi-Swaps...

...Carole and I make our living here in France by finding visitors a home rental for their stay. On our websites you can see some of the properties which we offer and can book for you. We know that many visitors would like to save money by home exchanges so we are happy to recommend Holi-Swaps. You can also subscribe to the Holi-Swaps newsletter from our site at

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3. Using Your Laptop in France

Many visitors to France bring a laptop computer to keep in touch. There are several advantages in having your own computer, not the least is the fact that you can use a familiar keyboard. The French keyboard has a different layout and can provide some very odd E-mail.

I publish this letter from a reader, which gives some good advice and shows one way to keep out of the expensive clutches of France Telecom

Dear Tony, I want to thank you for an outstanding newsletter. I have followed much of your advice, preparing for and then enjoying my recent month in the tiny village of Entrecasteaux.

I thought you might be interested that I had quite an easy time preparing my laptop for use in France, and linking to AOL. During weekdays, at hours of business in the U.S., it was almost impossible to get on-line. What I did was to quickly save messages to a correspondence file, and then read and respond in Word. Then later, I'd go on-line after copying, and paste the message into my email. It worked beautifully, and total costs will be less than $150.00 for a month's heavy duty correspondence. AOL charges $3.50/hour. In that way I avoided the French phone system, and as I have saved most of the messages, they have become a journal which I will print and paste in my photo album. Thank you so much for alerting me to the communications problems, so that I thought this one through very carefully before going.

Keep up your great, informative site! By the way, I used Chez Oz (one of your suggestions) to rent my little house, and I was delighted with their honesty and service.

Sincerely Myrna

Chez Oz are at..http://www.chez-oz.com.au/

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4. Christmas Special Offers

We still have some properties available for rental over Christmas and the New Year in the South of France. Champagne in the fridge, possibly Christmas lunch on the terrace, play "hunt the barrel" in Nizas. Look at the properties at...

http://goto-france.com/

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5. French Property Digest

The new newsletter and website now has a name, it will be called "French Property Digest". It is planned to come to life before Christmas and the first proper monthly edition is scheduled for the second Wednesday of January. I am gathering material now and I am keen to contact more specialists who have professional skills in any subject relating to - France, Property, Law, Finance, business or Commerce.

The idea is for there to be a regular free information newsletter twice a month and a modest paid subscription to the monthly digest which will have quality information and contacts plus individual advice and assistance. On-line E-books on a wide range of topics will be available for downloading, these will give up-to-the-minute information on specialist subjects relating to France and property.

From your comments and your requests I am planning to include features on - health, safety, finance, property sales, letting contracts and laws, tax advice, transport, food and drink, gardening, building and surveying and a host of other topics.

I will advise you of the subscription rates and more details in the next newsletter. Please write to me if you have any comments, would like to receive this newsletter or would like to write about your specialist topic. This is a commercial venture and we expect to reward contributors as well as to publish and sell their on-line books.

Please write to me at

mailto:Tony@Nizas.com

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6. WotSpot.com

Our business here is to find good rental properties for anyone who wishes to visit France. Our websites show some of the properties we can offer and we can often arrange the booking for you. We also now accept some advertising for other properties where you can book direct.

Our first aim is to serve the guests coming to France and to do this we are looking at ways of offering a wider range of properties in other regions of France and even other countries as many of our visitors are travelling to more than one country in Europe.

I believe the best way to offer a good service is to work together with other Internet rental sites and to make a good reference site which can offer a wide selection of properties.

In this letter I talk about the home exchange site at

http://www.holi-swaps.com

I am also talking with a number of other home rental sites and have just started to build a new site at ..

http://wotspot.com

This will soon include many of the properties I am listing on my sites like...

http://Rentals-France.com/

...but it also has many more properties offered by other home rental companies on the Internet.

It would help me to plan this service if you could look at this site at...

http://wotspot.com/

...and tell me if you found it easy to use and helpful.

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7. Recipe from Nizas #6

Moules à la Mariniere full details on

http://nizas.com/recipes/006jg.html

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8. The Nizas Project - The Barrel Has Gone

OK I own up, I moved it, it is now in an alleyway at the rear of Mme J.... house. However, before this, the barrel had a very eventful week. When it was last moved back into the middle of the road by the builders son F...., he glued it to the road with some white mastic. The flower pots, with the now dead and withered flowers, was put back on top.

Two days later I saw it on its side and the flowerpots broken. Mme J.... told me that a car being driven by a leaflet distribution company had reversed into it, this was bound to happen to any barrel which is left in the middle of the road. When I next looked after lunch, the barrel was again vertical, the pathetic flowerpot remains and shredded dead geraniums were back on top and more builders mastic applied to the base, plus the barrel was half filled with water to make sure that any car would come off the loser in a future collision.

Mid afternoon I looked out and saw Mme J..... and one of her daughters struggling with the now very heavy barrel to move it so that their car could park. Mme J... was going to the cemetery to pay respects to her husbands grave. Naturally I went to help, we drained out the water and I gave the large plastic bung to Mme J.... daughter. It is now part of the flower arrangement on a tombstone. It seemed prudent to move the barrel out of sight, so it now has a new home, no doubt a temporary one in the alley at the back of Mme J.... house.

Interestingly the barrel has a permanent place in the history of Nizas. In France the center of all community life is the "Mairie", the town hall. The mayor is a very important person and the position carries a lot of responsibility and authority. In every Mairie there is a book where all the complaints and comments of the residents is permanently recorded, you can report a murder or a neighbour who seems to have more money than their tax returns would suggest, or you can report rogue barrels which take up parking space. I am told that our historic register now has a report of an official complaint about the Nizas barrel.

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9. Protect Your Consumer Travel Rights

This is a nonprofit organisation where you can learn about your rights and register complaints..

http://www.mytravelrights.com/

Any complaints registered are sent on to the relevant government or trade body.

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I really wish to make my sites accurate. Any mistake or typo, dead link (not on the links pages) or error I will reward with a bottle of wine. You will have to come here to drink it, but I can arrange for it to be drunk for you and send you a certificate verifying that it was a good bottle and thanking you for your time.

Best Wishes

Tony Tidswell