Whisky Tourism Guide: Green Motion Car Rental

This is the first article in a new series of posts to help those travelling to Scotland to visit distilleries and generally enjoy the Scottish culture and landscape. Living in Scotland and indeed a stone’s throw from Glasgow Airport I am in a great position to give advice on how to get around when you come to Scotland.

In future posts I hope to try out and review a number of different services available to tourists and hopefully help you avoid any pitfalls along the way. Coming to Scotland isn’t a cheap holiday and while there are a great number of excellent service focused business’s out there, there are also some only out to be nothing more than tourist traps.

So picture the scene.

You have a couple weeks of work and you are coming to Scotland maybe with family or maybe a group of you are going together. The itinerary is done and the tours are booked. You have contacted all the hotels and got rooms sorted but how do you get around?

The distances from the airports to the distilleries is pretty large and even then the distance between distilleries you have tours booked means you need a car because Scottish public transport is not the best in Europe (by a long shot). So if you decide on renting a car Green Motion is probably going to be the cheapest at the Glasgow Airport.

I used Green Motion for our family holiday this year and have never had a worse experience with a car rental company ever.

The first thing to be aware of is you need to read the documents very carefully. Green Motion need a credit card, not a debit card. They need ID of course but also a utility bill. Very few if any other documents will be accepted without an additional charge. Speaking of additional charges you can expect the hard sell on removing your excess and insuring against damage. For my rental the excess payment was £1700 on a 19 plate Citroen Berlingo.

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As with all rentals it is important to find any existing damage to the car before you leave. The agent I had was very relaxed about the whole procedure and said small amounts of damage are of not consequence. This along with only showing the car inside a poorly lit warehouse should have been massive red flags. To some extent they were and I tried my best to find any damage on the car. Other than the already marked curbed wheel I couldn’t find anything. This didn’t seem out of place since the car was basically new on little miles.

Of course you know what happened.

There was in fact some scratched panels hidden behind the poor lighting and dark metallic plate which was super obvious in direct sunlight. Direct sunlight which I only had some 300 miles later that day! I took a picture of it and because it was light and not all the way through the paint I thought it would be fine. Certainly judging by the relaxed nature of the staff when I collected the car.

Of course when I did return the car no-one was relaxed about damage once gave it back. There was an extensive assessment of the car and a deep look for damage under bumpers, on every wheel and inside every nook of the vehicle.

The damage was of course challenged but I spoke to the manager and we agreed it wasn’t my fault. I signed as such and went on my way. It looked like this would be a great review for Green Motion but it didn’t quite work out that way.

As I was waiting outside to be collected by Mrs Malted the attitude turned black inside the office. Someone had decided the manager had fucked up and I was liable for the damage after all. My sign in sheet was ripped up and I was told to sign a new one for damage or never see any any of my deposit ever again.

I was refused access to the head office and told to prove the first sheet ever existed. There is major worries here with it being standard practice to not give customers copies of the sign in sheet how can you ever be sure you won’t be a victim of the same problem I had?

As it turns out I am not the first one to experience a terrible return procedure with Green Motion either. See the links below and if you know what is good for you never and i mean never use Green Motion for renting a car in the UK especially from Glasgow Airport.