Updates to the way we pre-authorise payments

Many of you said that, if you had requested multiple cars for the same period, trying to maximise your chances to get a car, it didn’t feel right that we were pre-authorising the full payment amount for each of those booking requests. Of course the funds for any bookings that are declined or that expire are sent back into your payment card, but we know that banks might take several days to do so. This wasn’t great (it sucked!), but we’ve listened to you.

To solve the problem, we have made our payment system smarter, which means that:

If you make multiple booking requests,

And the start date and time for those bookings is the same,

Then we pre-authorise the full amount for the first booking request, and only any additional amount required for further requests.

Let’s see how the new system works with an example:

• Imagine that I send a booking request for this Volkswagen Golf, for a couple of days, starting on the 1st of August at 10am. I pay £80.42. Hiyacar payment system pre-authorises the full amount from my card.
• As the owner of the Golf hasn’t responded yet and I want to secure a car for those 2 days, I decide to send a booking request to another owner. This time I request to book this Honda Insight, for exactly the same start date and time (1st of August at 10am) and I pay £120.42. However, in this instance Hiyacar only pre-authorises the difference between my first request and the second one, that is, just £40.
• Now say that I want to send a third request for this Toyota Yaris, again for the same start date and time. This time the amount I pay is £78.42 but, because Hiyacar has already pre-authorised payments for a higher amount (a total of £120.42 so far), we pre-authorise nothing, £0.
• You can keep sending as many booking requests as you want, and only any additional differences will be pre-authorised, as long as you keep the same pick-up date and time.

We used to encourage drivers to send multiple requests to make sure that they would get a car for when they needed it. Thanks to this update to our payment system, now we encourage you to do so even more.

We 100% believe Hiyacar is the best peer to peer car rental platform out there, and now our payment engine has just got a BIG upgrade. Amazing work by our tech team.

Thank you again for all your feedback.