See if anything in these recent postings can help you out. Not exact same circumstances but, at least, you can find out where to complain:

Complaint:

http://tinyurl.com/4yoew6

followed by good news:

http://tinyurl.com/3ef5ue

Be patient, but also be persistent. I have no doubt you will get your refund, but wheels turn slowly in some of these organisations. I have received refunds from cartrawler in the past and they are OK to deal with in my experience.

As far as I know, Cartrawler and Argus are the same company.

I have had problems with them in the past and their customer service is useless. They operate a system of logging complaints by email but they just ignore the emails

I hired a car with them at Newark airport and the fuel terms said collect full and return full. When I got there National refused to release the car unless I paid for a full tank. Having no choice I paid it and complained later. When I complained they produced the National voucher I had reluctantly signed which showed I had agreed to pay the fuel!

Another time I was charged twice (once by Argus and once by rental company) and am still trying to get a refund.

I've recently experienced the same sort of problems with Angus/Cartrawler. I paid £96 to them for 4 days car hire in Tampa in August, but when we arrived at the airport Alamo wouldn't honour Cartrawler's voucher, and wanted another $500 for the same hire period. How they can justify charging that much for 4 days I don't know.

I have since tried to contact Cartrawler on various occasions, but keep getting fobbed off with their standard acknowledgement email. Has anyone ever managed to get a refund out of them?

I concur with Irish Rover.

Its horrible wondering which pillar and post to go to next but be peristent with both of them.

I had a similar experience with an agent. I arrived to my hotel to find they had not paid the hotel. They had taken my booking and booked it through another agent whom should have paid the hotel. Somebody along the line(other than me) forgot to advance pay the hotel. I had to cough up credit card which was refunded as soon as the agent had corrected issue.

But still, its not a position to want to be in when supposed to be on holiday/vacaction. Bear in mind, I was in Eastern Europe where speaking English is not a priority so the difficulties were enormous.

By the way. I have used Arguscarhire.ie in Paris and they were great except Sixt gave me a German plated car that was dirty inside. They kindly sent me a €50 voucher even though I never book direct and you cannot use it if using an agent. Boo Hoo to me!!

I used CarTrawler to book a car in Cape Town. They promptly charged me €72 for the deposit. When I asked them for a receipt for this they said "we are an online company and therefore can not extend receipts".

So now I'm left with no invoice/receipt so I can't claim the expense (I'm here for work). I've raised 4 troubletickets on their online system, each time getting the same thing and them promptly closing off the ticket.

Their service is completely unsatisfactory and DO NOT use them unless you want to be disspointed.

Kitty,

Here's a story out of Mexico where there was no vehicle was available to the customer from Canada, despite that person having a confirmation number for the booking:

cnn.com/2008/…index.html

Happy ending.... and some good advice on asking to talk to manager and calling the car rental company's reservation number for help. At the very least, use a copy of story as Exhibit D in your case against the companies you dealt with.

Keep us posted on what happens.

Hello everyone, I wanted to follow up on our issue here.

We were just contacted for the first time today by car trawler. They say that there is no record of our reservation! (How convenient) They are asking us to provide the credit card number that we put on the reservation.

Does this sound fishy to anyone else?

I forwarded them all of our documents that THEY provided when we made the reservation but are still asking for the credit card number.

In this day and age of so much identity theft and fraud, I am hesitant to give them a credit card number, but that seems to be the only way to get anywhere.