Has anyone experience with Enterprise đźš— car rental in the UK?

Hi there.

Has anyone experience with Revolut cards and UK Enterprise car rentals?

This is what they are saying on their website about payment options:

Payment- if the rental is not prepaid, the renter must pay a deposit and the full rental charges using a major debit or credit card in his or her own name. If the rental is prepaid, the renter must pay a deposit using a major debit or credit card in his or her own name. The deposit is 200 GBP, or 500 GBP if renting a premium vehicle. Payment by a credit card in the main drivers name will be required to rent premium vehicles . If the debit or credit card differs from that used to prepay the rental charges, an additional 200 GBP deposit is required.

I am fully aware of the benefits of using “real” credit cards for car rentals and why the industry is reluctant in accepting prepaid debit cards like Revolut. But my own experience is that some rentals do accept the Revolut card.

So has anyone any experience? Was Revolut accepted or declined at an Enterprise UK branch for modest rental costs (100 GBP rental price + 200 GBP deposit)?

Thanks for sharing!

:red_car:

Enterprise UK don’t accept Maestro, Electron. Solo or pre-paid cards as payment methods: https://www.enterprise.co.uk/en/help/faqs/can-i-hire-a-car-with-a-debit-card.html

Some of them let you use it for the actual hire payment but not the guarantee (hold) part - Budget might be one of these IIRC.

Yes. I am interested in some real world experience. I have used the Revolut card with rental service that claim not to accept prepaid cards before. So I was wondering if someone actually tried it.

Just for information AVIS Thailand accept Revolut for pay and for deposit

1 Like

Here’s a litte story about how this weekend trip went:

Since Enterprise UK clearly states in their FAQs that they aren’t supporting prepaid cards (thanks for point it out, @Pangolin), I didn’t bother to try it. I confirmed with Transferwise’s support instead that their card should work. I made a reservation online and selected to pay when picking the car up.

When we picked up the car, Enterprise had technical difficulties of a different kind. My name has a diacritical sign in it and that prevented the reservation from going through. They use fancy tablet computers to do all the necessary steps to hand over the car. But it wouldn’t allow him to proceed. The computer said “wrong name” since the system would not allow special characters in that form field. And since I made the reservation by myself online, the system wouldn’t allow him to change the name.

Long story short, the poor guy had to copy and paste everything over from my reservation into a new contract. After all that confusion, the POS terminal was activated, showed the correct amount including the deposit. I finally put in the TW card and confirmed with the PIN.

There was no error code on the terminal. The guy said “I guess it went through” and wished us a good trip.

I was confused since the Transferwise app didn’t show the transaction immediately. And indeed, after a couple of hours, there was a message on the phone’s mailbox. I called back. A woman told me that there was indeed a problem with the payment, it didn’t go through, she apologized and asked me if it would be okay for me if she would try it again manually. I agreed and gave her the number of the TW card over phone. The payment was now successful and showed up in the TW app.

Enterprise did not mention any further problems when I returned the car. I am now waiting for the deposit to be returned.

In the end, everything worked out fine for me but it was still kind of an invalid experiment. Under normal circumstances, without all that confusion about the name, would they have accepted the TW card in the first place? Or was their terminal refusing the card and the guy was just too occupied to notice it? I believe the 2nd manual try to change me would have worked with any card, even a Revolut card, since it was a manual card not present transaction like I’ve done a couple of times before with Revolut cards.