We've got mail:Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, text or blog your experience to us.
Taking a Punto on a Focus offer
On a recent trip to Ireland for a wedding, Gerard Montague reserved and paid for a group C Hertz hire car to be picked up at Dublin Airport. The example given on the Hertz Ireland website for group C was a Ford Focus 1.4, which seemed adequate to his party's needs, Montague writes. "But the car supplied was a Fiat Punto 1.2, at the very cheapest level of trim, lacking even such basic features as a trip odometer. The Hertz desk refused to offer us another car. The result was an extremely cramped and uncomfortable trip across country for a group of adults."
Montague adds that when he contacted the company to complain, it took nearly four weeks to reply. When it did get back to him, the letter apologised for the fact that he was dissatisfied with his car but "sidestepped the substance of the complaint altogether, claiming that a group C car had been ordered, and a group C car supplied".
According to Montague, the letter from Hertz "clearly avoided directly wording the claim that a Punto is in the same class as the Focus, something that not even Fiat would claim. (The Fiat model corresponding to the Focus is the Bravo.) But the substance of their reply means exactly that."
Montague points out that the Punto, as supplied, was worth almost €5,000 less than even the cheapest Ford Focus on the market. In fact, the Punto is even cheaper than the Opel Corsa, the car which Hertz gives as the example for group B.
"Being involved in the motor industry, I happen to know that Corsa/Punto were jointly developed by Fiat/GM and share most components, which puts the Punto clearly into the same group category as the Corsa," Montague writes. A further letter from him, pointing out these facts, simply went unanswered by Hertz.
"Does this sound like a clear case of rip-off?" Montague asks. "It does to me."
The widely accepted rival to the Ford Focus, which our reader ordered and paid for, is the outgoing Fiat Stilo or the new Fiat Bravo, while the Fiat Punto he actually got is comparable to the Ford Fiesta.
PriceWatch contacted Hertz to see if it did, in fact, believe that the Punto and the Focus were in the same category.
A spokesman said that the question was "subjective", but pointed out that the difference in price between renting the two cars was only €13 over the five days.
He said that the company would take our reader's concerns on board and added that it was prepared to offer him a refund of €50 because of his obvious dissatisfaction.
Anti-euro software
Claire Bruton got in touch to let us know about a huge difference in the price of the same product, depending on whether you order through a company's Irish website or its US one.
"I wanted to install a Norton anti-virus programme on my computer," she writes. "I decided on the product Norton 360, which had a sterling price of £59.99 (€83.74). I checked out the US website and the same product was available for $79.99 (€54.75) . . . No prizes for guessing which site I ordered from!"
We had a look at the Norton online store and noticed that it is selling its Norton 360 software "from €89.99" through its Irish division and "from $69.99" (€47.90), which is nearly half the price.
