"First of all they didn’t honor the rate agreed through various e-mails, already including all the taxes and possible insurances, as their employee Silvia confirmed me. They instead applied me an extra 120$, plus an other 100$ for not paying in dollars (nowhere advertised, but at that point I had …"
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"First of all they didn’t honor the rate agreed through various e-mails, already including all the taxes and possible insurances, as their employee Silvia confirmed me. They instead applied me an extra 120$, plus an other 100$ for not paying in dollars (nowhere advertised, but at that point I had no time, nor intention to get more dollars, since the local money is colones, I thought, not for Poas btw). They informed me anyway that they had an upgrade for me: a Daihatsu Terios, instead of the Toyota 4wd originally proposed, what an upgrade, it really was worth the extra 120$! Btw. 99 out of 100 rented cars circulating in the country are Daihatsu Terios, so I don’t see the point of offering a “Toyota 4wd or similar”, instead of a “Daihatsu Terios or similar”, that would be fair.
The air conditioning was not working and the car had various minor problems, until one Sunday morning it definitely stopped working and nobody answered to the telephone number they gave us as 24/7 assistance, while the office was obviously closed. We had to pay a taxi – over the 1300$ already paid for 17-days rental – to avoid missing the excursion we had already paid for in Monteverde, while they never ever called us back to at least hear if everything was ok, since we had left a number of calls on the mobile number provided.
The day we had to return the car, they arrived three hours later the agreed time (while we were wandering and doing nothing around the hotel, since we supposed they would have arrive in seconds) and guess what: they tried to charged us those three hours. That’s simply ridiculous! Obviously we didn’t accept this one more cheat, but at the end Luiz managed to get some money out of us: yes, the gasoline! Knowing that it is a common practice to cheat you on the gasoline’s price, we got the tank full just few kilometers away from the hotel, and it was indeed still full at the check, but surprisingly a new story was prepared just for our case: Luiz had indeed to take the car back to Alajuela, and by the time he would have got there, the tank would have been not full any longer. Why then did I chase on their proper web-site to deliver/return the car in San Jose Downtown with no extra charge if at the end I have to pay for you taking it to Alajuela???? I could have returned it to Alajuela by myself, also avoiding to wait you for three hours. But obviously they would have just prepared a new cheat, don’t you believe it? Furthermore: after driving for 4 hours that morning we got the tank full for 10.000 colones, while Luiz pretended we pay him 5000 to drive 20 minutes to Alajuela. Always the problem of changing colones in dollars, I guess…
Anyway we paid, wishing to Luiz and his company of cheaters and liars a very merry Christmas, if you understand what I mean. Shame on you Poas to take advantage of your customers, cheating them and letting them completely uncared in a foreign country. Luckily ticos are generally much much better than this folks. Just one last cheat: to compensate all the trouble occurred at the beginning, they would have pre-authorized our credit card for only 100$, instead of the 950$ originally agreed (we had anyway already included a super-complete insurance, so it was not an hazard for them to pre-authorize us less money…); they finally pre-authorized twice, so $200, which btw were not really pre-authorized, but charged and they incidentally forgot to release the money after we returned the car, that’s why we had to dispute the charge through Visa.
If you want a problem-free vacation in Costa Rica, don’t even think to contact Poas, simply DON’T TRUST THEM! We did, and it was a too expensive mistake."
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