Drivalia UK - BELFAST INTL AIRPORT Reviews 

AJ was great

Great service, AJ was very friendly and accommodating. Nice car upgrade as well.

Super friendly and efficient service- would definitely recommend and use again!

Fantastic service from booking to dropping off the car.
RK made the process effortless when we picked the car up. You get offered the additional insurance to reduce your excess, but they are not pushy if you say no.
Will certainly be using them again and highly recommend them.

Firstly Drivalia pick you up at Belfast airport and drive for ten minutes to a rural location where you have no bearings of where you are. They then give you 4 options of excess/insurance from £200 to £300 or you can pay £1500 which is a holding fee. This holding fee can only be an option if you have a credit card. If you only have a Debit card like myself, the holding fee is not an option. They then hit you with a cross border charge that was never mentioned until you are stuck out in the rural location!!
A total scam. Avoid at all costs.

We rented a car for 10 days. We called in advance to make sure everything we needed was included. The person on the phone was very nice. When we arrived at the desk 3 guys where there, 2 at the desk and one supervising, we were offered alto change our contract to a full insured car which would only be about 300£ when our renting was about 260£ they kept on including things and saying it was just an extra … per day, making it pretty hard to follow the extra costs even know I kept asking for the full price. We then decided to keep our rental as we initially wanted it. The person at the desk went to speak with the manager, came back and made us a new offer. At this stage we were told it would only be around 380£ with all the extras if we both agreed on leaving a good review right there on both, trustpilot and google. By the end when I was asked to pay the price jumped to about 600£ but at that stage after all the talking I decided to just do it and be able to get the car and go.

We got an “upgraded” car which was very dirty inside and outside, petrol was not full. (My initial contract was a full full).

We managed to have a good trip and were unfortunated on the way back as we were driving to drop by the car a stone hit the windscreen and cracked it. Good we got the extra of the insurance after all but it was very misleading (on purpose) the way the adds on were mentioned also on he contract it doesn’t mention anything of what is included in the full peace of mind insurance which I think would be misleading in their advantage if needed.

I rent car very often and it can be overwhelming and they defo take advantage of it, even know the guys at the counter were nice, the system is made to make you pay extra.

AJ was great, friendly and efficient service.

Excellent customer service from AJ today, we will definitely use this company again!

Fantastic customer service.

Would highly recommend

AJ is a legend

RK was fantastic and really helped us out. Everyone else we dealt with were very professional and friendly. Would definitely recommend.

I hadn't organised myself properly. Incorrect name on the booking and forgot my credit card. Alan was really helpful. Can't recommend enough. Will be back!

DO NOT BOOK HERE - all staff trying to fleece you and are crafty trying to upsell and trick you into extra charges for insurance and personal commission. Use SIXT, Enterprise or Budget instead, for a smoother and better experience and deal.

Completely untrustworthy - some double their salary based on commissions alone so they are experts at trying to fleece you. The worst car rental l've ever experienced.

Terrible customer service, terrible location (not at the airport); no signal and broken WiFi; can’t get a shuttle outside of opening hours; poor checkin process including filling in paperwork by hand; requesting unnecessary information like your return flight details; poor selection of cars and there are piles of hidden charges. Cheap prices aren't real. Won't hold car for longer than two hour delay saying it’s due to the booking agent like Skyscanner and will pretend there are only highly expensive cars left if you are late.

My flight was delayed by 24 hours and called them and told me a vehicle would be still available “we will sort you out”. I paid £20 for a two day hire originally and he tried to charge me £73 for a one day hire saying only expensive cars now avail which was not true. He just wrote down the prices and slid them across the desk as don’t think he could say it with a straight face.

I made a new booking for one day hire online 5 mins later with the same company for £20 and ‘magically’ a small vehicle was immediately available. Watch out for Nick as he is the boss and blatantly tried to fleece me; told me that someone upgraded to a bigger car so the small car became available by coincidence in the 5 min that I was booking online. Bullshit from start to finish but watch out, ALL staff are doing the same, with a straight face and I imagine a sense of achievement for fleecing people.

Brilliant and so easy to use and deal with from start to finish.
Great service and help from RK and Nick.

Nick was great
Very helpful
Easy transaction
Lovely driver too thanks

Great service provided by RK at the Belfast International Airport site.

Dear Mr. Drivalia,

The staff at your Belfast Airport branch told me to “contact Mr. Drivalia” if I wanted to complain, so here I am.

We booked a small automatic car because Drivalia offered one of the best prices online. During booking, we selected a pick-up time, but nowhere was it made sufficiently clear that this was a strict deadline rather than an estimated arrival time.

Only afterwards did I discover your Terms & Conditions state:

“In case of delay, reservations will be held for 59 minutes from the specified reservation pick-up time, after which they will be classed as a no-show…”

For an airport car rental company, this policy is ridiculous. Flights are delayed every day.

Our flight from Paris was delayed by around one hour due to the heatwave. I even called from Paris to warn your staff we would arrive around 4:30 pm, but because the office closes at 3:00 pm on Saturdays, our booking was automatically cancelled. When I asked why an airport rental company couldn’t accommodate delayed flights, I was told, “We are humans and have children to get to.”

We are humans too. We work hard for our holidays. Because of this policy we lost the first day of our road trip and had to cancel accommodation.

The next morning our original car was gone, so we had to take a larger, more expensive vehicle. Because we only had a debit card, we were forced into one of the most expensive insurance options (around £300). Then came another surprise: a £72 cross-border fee that wasn’t made clear during booking.

Before we had even started our holiday, we were already around €350 over budget.

When returning the car, we were charged a £150 excess plus an £80 administration fee for a scratch that did not appear to exceed the 5 cm threshold your staff had told us would not be charged.

What made this experience so frustrating wasn’t one issue—it was the constant lack of transparency. Every stage introduced another unexpected cost.

Mr. Drivalia, here’s a free suggestion. Plug your booking system into Claude. If it’s an old spreadsheet, ask Claude to export it properly, then have it automatically message customers to confirm their arrival time and warn them that bookings are cancelled after 59 minutes. This would prevent situations like ours, save your staff time, and stop you losing customers.

This experience seriously impacted our holiday, and we will never rent from Drivalia again. Please don’t underestimate the impact of one unhappy customer: during our trip we attended a wedding with people from across Northern Ireland, and when they asked about our road trip, I told them exactly what happened.

I’m not writing this simply to complain. I’m hoping you’ll review our case, acknowledge that this customer experience fell well below expectations, and offer an appropriate refund or goodwill gesture. (refer to google review for pics of proof )

We had some issues with our booking initially (which were the fault of booking.com and not Drivalia). The Manager, Nick, went above and beyond to sort everything out in a calm and friendly manner. We cannot thank him enough. Will definitely use them again.

RK was super helpful and the process was super easy!

Nearly three years and I still wake up in the night feeling bitter about our dreadful experience with this company and their intimidating taxi driver. I would advise you all never to take a Drivalia car anywhere in the country.

The positive reviews are undubitably fake. I don't understand why Trust Pilot allows its review process to be hijacked by fake reviews.

Having said that, at least the reviews are there, although the company are clearly able to keep pace by regular additions of fakes to keep the 'average' above 4.

Great customer service, fast, lovely car! AJ was the greatest car agent ever at Belfast International Airport, would absolutely recommend this service!