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North Island ▷ Auckland Region ▷ Auckland ▷
Classic Campers
Unless you want to spend your vacation repairing your van, and being blamed for it’s failures, don't rent from this unethical company.
We rented Van 6 for 14 days. On pick up day, were briefed for three hours on bloopers and deathly accidents, all of which Bevan claimed to be caused by renter stupidity. He said that if we followed his simple rules, like checking oil and gauges, we wouldn’t have problems. Before being released, we completed a drive test to demonstrate that we could start and drive the van.
Day 1 - Auxiliary battery failure.
Notified Bevan. No solution was provided.
Day 2 - Engine failure.
Van starts but the engine died a minute later. We arranged a jump to get us to our next destination. Bevan’s only suggestion was that we find a mechanic.
Day 3 - Mechanic: “find alternate transportation”
Surprise! The van didn’t start. Bevan asked us to jump it, then make three trips to mechanics and auto parts stores.
Four hours later, the first mechanic told us his “fix is temporary” and we “should find alternate transportation if [we] want a hassle-free trip”. Bevan didn’t offer a replacement or guarantee repair of our van before our ferry to the south island the next morning. We had to rent a another car.
Day 3 - Van returned without refund.
Bevan rejected our request for partial refund, saying that we owed him more time to diagnose the issue and repair it. There is no statement in the contract outlining such an outrageous expectation. The van should’ve been checked and in working order.
A week later, we found the van in Queenstown. Turns out the new renters broke down five times in two weeks. One cause was a faulty ignition coil, which can lead to the engine failure we reported.
Bevan finally promised a goodwill refund for a couple days but the credit we received covered just one day. At no time did he apologize or accept responsibility for the lost time and cost we incurred. You'll fall in love with these vans - just find another company!
Clearly - Lori and Mischa are some classic unhappy campers.
Sadly this review contains falsehoods and exaggerations eg. the starting and Auxiliary batteries didn't fail and are still fine, neither did the engine fail.
I checked with Turangi business where mechanic looked at van, and was advised that Lori was upset at not getting her 1st van choice (Van 1) which we hadn't committed to, and couldn't allocate due to an accident with another one of our vans (part of of our approx 10-15mins(not 3hr) prehire warnings/advice session.), his actual comment to me "he didn't replace parts that weren't broken" . Our classic wagons like to treated with some extra care eg follow starting procedure for cold starts - e.g. pressing accelerator pedal not brake pedal as many are in habit of nowadays. As nothing to fix per mechanic and subsequently checked out in Wgtn (where dropped off- 4 hours further drive), then no entitlement for refund for remaining days payable for early return unless non fixable/and no replacement found, they were reminded of this policy before dropping in Wgtn, and as per their signed rental agreement.
Re next hirers: Yes the coil did fail (rare) but is unrelated to the cold start issue The next hirers were fine at starting the van each morning all the way to Milford Sound (further 1100kms). Unfortunately the mechanic replaced an incorrect style of coil which failed approx 400 miles later etc.. (We refunded the subsequent hirer over twice our policy for the extra unnecessary inconvenience )
We have been rolling for 12 years with 100s of happy customers and millions of happy miles from our vans. We do pride ourselves as an ethical company and in good faith do our best to deal with issues if they arise.
It saddens us that Lori and Mishca felt let down, however we do wish them well.
classiccampers