Very Bad Experience renting a car with Sicily By Car

This summer we went to Slovenia, but Ryanair at our local airport flies to Trieste and not to Ljubljana, so we decided to fly there, and rent a car. In Trieste you have the usual rent-a-car companies, such as Avis, Europcar, and so on, and you have a few cheaper companies, among which we decided to rent with Sicily By Car: they were cheap and charged no additional fee for driving outside Italy and into Slovenia (which is a very safe country).

The online booking process was fine, and so was the check-in at the desk in Trieste airport, but when we saw the car (a Fiat 500) we were surprised, and not for good: a car with over 90000 kilometers, which is a lot for a rented car, and full of dents and scratches all over the place. It was faster writing down the parts that were fine than the ones that were damaged, so we took a few pictures and a video with our cell phone.

And off we went. Using the car was fine and uneventful, until the day before the last. We drove it for maybe 2 hours, and stopped for a while at the supermarket. When we came out, the car would not start: lights were on at the dashboard, but when I turned the key, the needles clicked and stirred, but the engine did not start, which was a clear sign that the battery was dead.

We tried to start several times, to no avail, and we started to panic, so we searched over the rental agreement, and found two telephone numbers: a toll-free number, but only when calling from Italy, and a regular Italian number to call from abroad. We called the latter since we were in Slovenia (though in Kranjska Gora, just 15 minutes from the Italian border), thinking that we would pay a lot of money for an international call (it was not the case, thanks to the roaming in the EU). We waited for 10 minutes, until finally a woman answered the call, but she just transferred us to the international department; we waited for 10 minutes more, and finally hung up (to save telephone costs).

Finally a good soul parked his van next to us and started our car with jumper cables, so we drove to our apartment in Gozd Martuljek, where my wife and daughter got off (they called the phone number again, with similar results, and wrote an e-mail, to which we are still waiting for a response) and I drove for 30 minutes more, in an effort to charge the battery, although that the battery had failed after driving for more than 2 hours that day was not a good sign.

And certainly, the car did not start the following day. In fact, we had to unlock the doors with the key because it was impossible remotely, and we had to recline the back seat and open the trunk from the inside as it was impossible from the outside. We called our apartment's host, and he called in turn a mechanic who charged us 20 euros for starting the car, again with jumper cables. We got an invoice from him, and we had to renounce to all our hiking plans that day, driving non-stop to Trieste airport without stopping the engine.

Luckily we had tanked the car the previous day, so we decided not to stop to tank on our way to the airport because that would have meant turning off the engine (otherwise there is risk of explosion), and probably being stuck at the gas station.

When we got to the airport, we asked the girl at Sicily by Car whether to turn off the car, what we did, explained everything to her and wrote a formal complaint in front of her.

And surprise, the next day we got a 47-euro charge in our credit card. We wrote an e-mail to Sicily by Car, and after a few days they sent us an invoice, in which there were 3 charges: a refueling service of 25 euros, nearly 10 euros for the gas and 4 euros for an airport charge which we do not know yet what it is.

We answered explaining again the situation, complaining for being charged the refueling service, for not being returned the 20 euros charged by the mechanic, and attaching again the formal complaint that we wrote at their desk, as well as the invoice, and after one week we have received no response yet. We will try to get our money back through our bank, but we know it will not be easy.

So think twice before renting with Sicily By Car!