Quarrel with a charter company over the boat damages

[meirriba]

270 euro are not worth the noise and the OP mentioned that it was a low cost charter. So if he had paid 300 euro more for the charter but had no problems with the company, would he be happy?
On the other hand - as customer of Sunsail, usually they did not do a return check up at all when we have returned to base. On one of the charters in Croatia we have approached the office several times to ask to release us. Finally a guy came and instead of looking for problems spent half an hour with us telling sailing stories...
Moorings in Tortola charged us $70 for something.
After a letter of complaint from me, they gave me €500 credit for any next charter with them...

[ErikFinn]

Originally Posted by ErikFinn

Another example of the the Greek greedy selfish no fks given mentality. F**k the rest of world as long as they can steal your money. It goes from the top of the government level to the grassroot business. Look where it got them. And no I'm not racist or biased. I have lived and worked on four continents and have a university business degree. I read the news. Sorry I can't be more positive about your situation. Good luck.

"But when Angelos suggested punishing those who tried to play the system, he was given a straight forward - if depressing - answer.
'If you start putting people in jail, maybe you'll have to put half of Greece in jail,' an official said."

Islands where just about everyone is blind .. World's oldest "living" pensioners...

I'm not in a habit of quoting my own posts or turning this thread into some politics debate, but since I believe some non-Europeans on this forum may not have an inkling about what has been going on in Greece I wanted to point to a new book by James Angelos:


James Angelos book reveals how Greece cheated itself to ruin amid bailout talks


Something is rotten in the state of Greece.

[SilentOption]

I think this is much like walking around a rental car and checking all the components before you leave the lot. Once you pull away anything wrong turns into a debate.
I have chartered several boats and every time something went wrong I know it would have been discovered had I spent more time at the dock before departing.
I'm not trying to turn this on you I am just saying an extra hour or two at the dock running all the systems including pulling then restowing the sails would likely have saved a lot of grief. I don't know how you recover your loss now that the trip is over. The company seems rather unscrupulous but you did take the boat away from the dock as it was.

[Seafari]

Sorry to hear about your bad experience with this charter company. Just bad mouth them on all the social media you can find and make sure they know about it. But having said that I'm sure the Greeks have more to worry about right now.

The lesson here is cash IS NOT KING and rather use a third party payment system for your own protection, like credit card. Totally unrelated but I recently lost a swag of my hard earned $$ when doing a direct bank transfer to pay for something and never received what I purchased. The company had despite emails confirming availability, shipping etc only hours prior to my payment the company announced that they were under administration, they were broke! Others who paid via PayPal and c/card were refunded in full but I lost my $2,100

[steppencat]

Well, next time I will ask the charter company: "If the boat suffers such damages, who will pay?" That's not a guarantee, but at least I could undertand their policies.

I've had some damages on my previous charters (I took the boat from an Austrian company in Turkey). Once the fender was squashed (other boat moored very close) - charter company manager have seen it but didn't even mention, the other time inflatable lifejacket was accidentaly inflated - they charged 50eur for that.

And of course you have to check what you can but you can't check everything. For example we had a problem with motor battery overheating when dynamo failed. The battery was very hot and very strong smell of evaporating acid filled the cabins. After such a destructive procedure you should change the battery and I said that to charter company manager but his answer was, like: "Oh, it's fine, it will work". Well, it will work for a while, It will show ok voltage on the voltmeter, but can fail, it will not hold charge if half the acid evaporated. But that will be the problem of the nex charterers, I think. I feel sorry for them but I did what I could - reported to the coast guard.

And yes, probably the bank could help if you use the credit card. But no guarantee - vlathom mentioned here that he wasn't able to recover the lost sum.