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sorry genoa but you were closest (Genoa)

If you try to translate the Italian “maggiore” into English one of your options will be “superior”. In the car rental business you won’t be more wrong.
Last year my wife and I spent six weeks in Italy. It was a great country to visit and we had a good time. My wife was so impressed she has had a shrine especially built in our backyard. It has an inscription that says, “I don’t know how he managed to drive on this trip without a GPS but whatever saved us I will pay tribute to for the rest of our days”.
And this is where Maggiore Car Rental comes in and why I would like all of you to NOT have to build a shrine.
We picked up a car in La Spezia.
The car was pre-ordered through a UK broker.
The brokers are OK.
Maggiore are not.
They were busy the morning, admittedly, when we picked up our car. It was a bit hit and miss but eventually we had a car and a GPS that was handed back the day before. We were on our way. The GPS gave us some hints as to how to escape the town and then complained about a failing battery. We plugged it into the cigarette lighter to charge up and finally managed to get going in the right direction using a dash of common sense.
Genoa was looming, en route to Nice. Checks with the supposedly charging GPS were not encouraging, but what the heck. We did get enough response from the machine to realise that despite our request the maps for France were not programmed.
NON ANDARE IN QUESTO MODO O SI MUORE
Now this is a typical Italian road sign. We saw this near Genoa. We knew that it meant , “Don’t worry if you are in a questionable mood because there is more wine up ahead.” We had read our guide books thoroughly.
So when we had somehow got through Genoa and were on our way to France we suspected that our guide book had erred just a tad. I did not realise that between the two of us we knew so many swear words.
The GPS? It clearly did not know any swear words otherwise it would have followed our instructions and would be doing things to itself that are not allowed to be printed. It was still sitting there, supposedly in charging mode, promising to be our saviour.
374 tunnels later we entered France. Nice was up the road. I have done French at school. All will be wunderbar. Oops. All will be vraiment bien.
Well, we have seen roundabouts near the Arc de Triomphe. We have had a little laugh at people going around and around. We know about one-way streets. We understand that some people drive on the other side of the road.
We soon became other people.
We parked in the suburbs and walked into town to find our way.
We made immediate contact with our UK brokers and continued to email them our problems. It became clear that Maggiore was not sharing our misery.
And so it was for MILAN, which we skirted on the way past and took the train back to later, and SWITZERLAND, which, along with FRANCE we found, had not even had the relevant data entered, and so too it was for any decent, visitable city along the road to VENICE.
At Venice we gave up, relinquished the vehicle to a second-rate airport pick-up point that reminded us of some parking lot and said goodbye to the car.
A month later. We are home. It is time to collect the refund for the GPS. AHA!
No response from Maggiore.
We contact the UK broker.
Thank you for your continued patience. Unfortunately, having contacted Maggiore’s Customer Service Department on numerous occasions concerning the 60.98 EUR transaction, I am yet to receive a response for the reason why this charge has been applied on your credit card.
As previously advised, Maggiore require all details in writing and are responding in date order. As it is peak season, it has been taking at least 28 working days for a response to be received. We are still awaiting for some responses sent at the start of August, this is not the standard of service we expect at all.
Nine months later we try again and get this response from Maggiore
Dear Mr
we answered to this claim directly to the tour operator that was managing
your issue. (we never received from you an email regarding it).
We have sent them the 03.01. Protected content email regarding this case and we
confirmed them that the charge for the GPS was correct because after many
checks with the locations , they confirmed that it was no problem.
For the above mentioned reason we do confirm that the charge is correct.
Regards
Alessia
So now I am looking up the internet translation for DO NOT NOT NOT NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH MAGGIORE IF YOU WANT TO HIRE A CAR IN ITALY.
I keep on getting CAZZATA, MERDA and STUPIDAGGINE.
I get a bit of the message here.
I think they are saying, “come to Italy, it is great place. But if it is car you want do not think MAGGIORE. They are **** company. They not care. They murder your wallet. They think you are stupido.

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