Good service with some annoying hangups on europcar side

The car was a 9 seater and was brilliant for our trip, it was clean on arrival. The only thing is the car park is very tight, apart from that all was smooth.

“Car” a lot bigger than expected - given a Fiat Ducato (9 seats) rather than the advertised VW Caravelle (7 seats) “or similar”. In my view 9 seaters should be in a different category - unbelievable that something like a Ford Galaxy is in the same set of ACRISS/SIPP codes as a massive Ducato! Asked but they did not have any smaller 7 seater available. Very challenging to drive and park due to the excessive size. Long wait in queue at pickup, but staff friendly and to their credit they didn’t do a hard sell on extra insurance when I explained I already had other excess cover. Also good that they didn’t try the usual hire company trick of trying to charge for spurious damages on drop off (it already had a lot of existing scratches)

We had to return the car and exchange it for a new one after one hour. Brakes were not working properly and tires needed air. The client service telephone line was completely useless. The Europcar representative that checked us in was careless and didnt explain the insurance conditions properly.

The email confirmation stated pick up was in terminal however this wasnt the case. I actually paid more for this privilege so i was disappointed to find that I had to get a shuttle bus to the pick up. Overall we had to wait a long time to get the car.

The initial pick up took forever, which was made worse by the heat, the first car we were offered was in a terrible condition and the staff were so unhelpful