Hallo Leute,
Ich bin Holländer und mein Deutsch ist nicht sehr gut. Die volgende Beitrag ist denn auch auf English geschrieben (Entschuldigung), aber Ich meine dass es wichtig genug ist für Deutsche es zu lesen.
My wife and I had decided to rent an Apollo Adventure Camper for our second Australia trip. On January 2, 2010, we were shown our 4wd Adventure Camper. We noticed straight away it was dirty. Also, it already had 95.000 km on the clock and it showed. As we knew in advance about the weaknesses of this campervan, we performed a thorough check. The doorstep was hanging loose and the two kitchen doors were hanging loose. One kitchen cupboard door could not be fixed properly (photo 1) and often fell open during driving, spilling the contents. Repairs caused a one hour delay. The girl who showed us the van had no 4wd experience. After departing, we bought food at a supermarket. When we arrived at our first destination we noticed that the fridge had not cooled down much. We drove a little more to load the battery some more. We found the campervan to be even filthier than we thought, and spent two hours cleaning it. Another problem was that one door lock wasn’t working properly and the other one not at all. The table and chairs were broken.
The next morning the fridge wasn’t working anymore and the service battery was empty. Over $50 of food was spoiled. When we called Apollo’s 24 Hour Service Helpline, we were told to call back later. After waiting an hour, we were told very impolitely that we’d just have to stay at normal campsites instead of going bush! So why does Apollo advertises it as a great way to camp in the bush? The Apollo representative even threatened to hang up on us. Our only option was to drive back to the Apollo Adelaide branch. This meant driving through the sprawled suburbs of Adelaide again for hours and shopping again – all our fridge food had spoiled. In Adelaide the battery was changed and a new lock was fitted on the door. This took quite some time.
When we drove back to Rapid Bay that afternoon, the doorstep came loose again (nice repair!) and we almost hit someone with it. We decided not to go back to Adelaide again and certainly to avoid another run in with the guy of the Apollo Helpline, as we were determined not to let Apollo spoil our holiday anymore. This meant tying up the step with rope every time we went for a drive, and untying it when we settled for the night (photo 2). When we tried to use the stabilising arm for more comfort, we noticed it had broken off (photo 3).
Two days passed before we woke up extremely cold in the middle of the night: half our bed was soaked in ice-cold water. The bolts in the mechanism to extend the roof weren't sealed, and in cold or rainy nights a puddle of water forms right around those bolts, after which the water drips onto the bed. To avoid this meant that from now we had to park the car in such a way that our heads would be below our feat – very uncomfortable. Also, condensation water every night from wetted our feet (photo 4). We had three (!) cookers, but only one of them worked as it should. The one working on gas canisters was dirty and unsafe. We couldn’t use the one inside, because when we did, the smoke alarm went off. Seeing that Apollo had already moved the smoke alarm once (the original fitting was still glued to the ceiling), they know about this problem. All that remained was the gas stove in the outside kitchen. The only trouble with that was that the whole kitchen fell open regularly during driving, even though it was locked! Imagine taking a corner on a tight road with an oncoming large vehicle! Now a more serious incident. We had noticed that one of the lampshades had an burn mark on it, but thought nothing of it. But on the evening of 10 February my wife was asleep in the camper and I was still outside, when I noticed a burning smell. When I went into the campervan I noticed smoke was coming from the bed, next to my wife. The interior light had burned a hole in the lampshade (photo 5) and ignited the bed sheet. Of course this time the smoke alarm didn’t go off! Why didn’t Apollo check this?
Another life-threatening episode took place on 16 February: I was almost electrocuted when I used the water cooker supplied by Apollo for the first time. I got a very strong electroshock when the water cooker proved to be leaking through the bottom onto the electrical system (photo 6 )! Shocking - in both senses of the word.
A few days later, in the middle of the night of 21 February, our car started moving slowly downhill! Luckily the incline wasn’t too steep and the car stopped, otherwise we could have ended up in the ocean. We had to secure the car by pulling on the handbrake extremely hard. Later on at a garage we asked to adjust the handbrake. The guy who helped us said he hardly dared to touch it for fear of breaking it, because it was so corroded. He also told us it looked like nobody had serviced that car for a while.
The clincher came on 25 February. We started the day with a flat tyre. We couldn't take the wheel off as the bolts were screwed on too tight. Luckily someone came along and helped us. When we got the spare wheel from its hiding place, we directly saw it was very worn. Also, there were complete chunks of rubber missing and it had been repaired illegally (photo 7). Unluckily we were in the middle of the Nullarbor and the next tyre repairs station was in Norseman, 450 km away. So we had to drive very carefully on the bad tyre, very slowly. Just before closing time we reached the garage in Norseman. They told us they'd been getting a lot of these Apollo campervans in lately and immediately declared the spare tyre illegal and proceeded to repair the other one. It soon became obvious that the tyre was not to blame for the leak, but that the rim of the wheel was the cause. Both wheel rims were severely damaged. It was caused by a previous renter (photos 8 & 9) and not repaired by Apollo. This, together with the tyre, is criminal negligence – it can get you killed, stuck in the desert etc.
When we left it was getting dark and we found ourselves in a place we didn’t choose to be in. Apollo’s carelessness forced us to stay in Norseman, on the terrible local campsite. A little later, when we walked back to our campervan after dinner, my wife and I were brutally assaulted: a masked man rushed to her and hit her in the face with a large, sharp pole. He grabbed her by the neck from behind and tried to use her as a hostage to get into the locked service station. I sprinted to help her but was immediately knocked unconscious with the pole and fell down. My wife then wanted to help me but was also knocked down with a blow to her head. The assailant then crashed through the service station door and robbed the place. We were taken to hospital by ambulance. I got 8 stitches to close the deep wound in my head and a severe concussion. My wife needed stitches to the inside of her lip, also had a concussion and lost a molar. In the middle of the night we were discharged. 5 minutes later was my birthday... (photo 10).
The rest of the holiday was (obviously) ruined by our injuries and shock. We were forced to travel another route, unprepared, and we didn’t like it. It was very hard to enjoy anything after what we’d been through. When we returned the campervan to Apollo’s extremely dirty Perth branch on 11 March, we asked the Apollo representative what our lives were worth. After hearing our story she left the room and called head office (strange, there was a phone right there - maybe we weren’t supposed to hear everything?). After 10 minutes she came back and said head office in Brisbane was closed. She told us that she was only allowed to give us back two days rent as compensation. So there we had our answer: to Apollo our lives were worth Au$ 124 each. We were promised that we would be called back by customer service.
Needless to say, we never were. Only after asking our money back via e-mail, Apollo reacted by denying all responsibility – not even the spoiled food was refunded. Then the customer service person from head office told us by accident that she was the one that authorized the two day refund when we were in the Perth office, revealing that the story of head office being closed was a big lie! It was just to get rid of us, a dirty trick that Apollo probably uses more often.
At the time of writing this, we are both still suffering from our wounds. We are starting legal action against Apollo. I have told my story here to warn people what they might be getting into when they rent with Apollo. You can find other horror stories about them elsewhere on the web. Your life is not safe, and they don’t care.
(The photos can be found on http://picasaweb.google.nl/xelinad/Apollo?feat=directlink)
![:]](https://www.australien-forum.de/images/smilies/pleased.gif "Freude"){kind=small}
Wie gut ein Vermieter wirklich ist, merkt man halt leider erst wenn es Probleme gibt.
