I’m really a bit miffed about having to write this, but any blogger who gets ripped-off will naturally end up writing about it, even when it’s a moronically stupid case like this. I can’t believe that any respectable company would behave the way that HireACamera.com has done, but they absolutely stand by their policy so I need to warn other people to make sure they don’t get caught out too.

Last month I photographed a major industrial project, and the company that I was working for asked me to also rent a hi-def video camera to record some video of what was happening. I decided to get the camera and a suitable tripod from HireACamera.com, so I got a quote from them, cleared it with the company I was working for, and booked the equipment.

The video camera arrived like this:

video camera damage

It worked fine, but unfortunately the tripod didn’t. One of the legs repeatedly collapsed and we lost a day of filming. The managing director of HireACamera.com, Guy Thatcher, wasn’t too concerned, telling me to just "tighten it up" and explaining that tripod legs can "sometimes work loose in transit".

We haven’t even got to the rip-off part of the story yet, but I’ll mention that HireACamera.com claim to inspect all equipment before dispatch. If that’s true then I don’t know how that video camera managed to slip through their inspection process. As for the tripod leg becoming slack in transit… well, my own tripod has been bumped around in various backpacks, bags, cars and buses for eight years now, and no part of it has ever come loose. HireACamera.com say that "tripods are always sent out in padded bags with the professional ones also then encased in a hard resin case". If that had been true then maybe the tripod they sent me would have reached me in good working order.

And so we arrive at the rip-off part of the story…

HireACamera.com don’t honour quotes.

I find that gobsmackingly stupid, but it’s true, and they have no shame in admitting it. How the hell can any business-to-business company think it’s right to not honour quotes? The whole point of a quote is to allow you to price a job for a client. No professional would ever work with a company that might randomly charge more than they had quoted. It’s just unthinkable!

What exactly happened was that the person at HireACamera.com who put my quote together mistakenly put the start/end dates as the delivery/collection dates, resulting in a quote for 12 days of rental instead of 14 days. When the mistake was spotted, close to the end of the rental period, HireACamera.com informed us that they’d be charging us for the extra 2 days. And because the rental had been paid for by credit card, they were free to just take the money. They even had the cheek to charge for a third extra day because they couldn’t get a courier to collect the equipment that day.

I’ve been on the phone for hours with these people and they are shamelessly unrepentant. They firmly believe that if they make a mistake with a quote then it is the client’s responsibility to make up the difference. So do they expect me to go back to my client and tell them that I need more money? I guess so. More likely is that it’s me who ends up out of pocket.

Am I saying that people shouldn’t deal with HireACamera.com? No. This is one person having one bad experience. What I am saying is that you should be extra careful when dealing with them. Make sure you get everything in writing, and make sure you double-check everything. Because if they make a mistake then they expect you to pay for it. It might also be a good idea to pay by cheque so they can’t just freely take money from your credit card whenever they see fit.

Oh and if you go to the HireACamera.com web site you’ll see that they make a very big deal of all the positive customer feedback they receive. Turns out they don’t like negative feedback. I posted the following comment on the company’s Facebook page, and it was deleted within minutes:

hire a camera facebook page

They justify deleting the entire comment because, they claim, the credit card charge was not "unauthorised". That’s a matter of debate.