Legal
Terms of use
These are the plain conditions on which this site is published and on which the small services described here are provided. They are written to be read once and understood, rather than to protect anyone from the consequences of their own words.
Who publishes this site
The site is published by a private individual in Dubai Marina. It is not a company, not a hire company, not a broker and not a booking agent for anyone who rents out vehicles. Nothing on these pages should be read as an offer to supply a car or as an introduction to someone who does.
Contact details, opening hours and the office address appear on the contact page. Questions about anything written here can be raised by telephone during opening hours or through the form, and are answered by the same person who wrote the pages.
What the guidance is and is not
Everything published here is general guidance based on personal experience of hiring cars in the Emirates. It describes how agreements are usually worded, how deposits are usually handled and how cars usually behave in this climate. It is not legal advice, not insurance advice and not a substitute for reading the document you are actually being asked to sign.
Hire companies word their agreements differently and change them without notice, and individual vehicles differ from one another in ways no general description can capture. Your own agreement is the document that binds you. Anything in it that materially affects your decision should be confirmed with the company, and where the sums are significant, with a qualified adviser.
Using the content of these pages
The text and the photographs on this site belong to the person who publishes it. You are welcome to read the pages, print them for your own use and share a link with anyone who might find them helpful. You may quote a short passage with a clear reference back to the page it came from.
Republishing whole guides elsewhere, rewriting them under another name or using the text to train a commercial system is not permitted without written agreement. Requests of that kind are usually answered positively when they are asked politely and in advance.
Booking a session or a walk-around
A booking exists once you have confirmed a written outline in your own words and any agreed payment has been made. The outline states what is covered, when it happens, what it costs in dirhams and what is excluded. Nothing outside that outline is promised, and nothing is added to it without being agreed in writing first.
Sessions may be moved or cancelled by you up to a day beforehand without charge. At shorter notice, a fair part of the fee may be retained where time has been reserved and cannot be used. If a session is cancelled from this side for any reason, anything paid is returned in full and without deduction.
What the services do not cover
No vehicle is hired, reserved or paid for on your behalf. Hire charges, deposits, insurance waivers, fuel, tolls, parking, fines and cleaning fees are matters between you and the hire company, and are paid by you directly to them. No responsibility is accepted for the decisions of any hire company, including refusals at a counter.
A handover walk-around is a careful inspection by an attentive person in the conditions available at the time. It is not a mechanical examination, not a warranty and not a guarantee that nothing has been missed. Faults that cannot be seen or heard at a collection bay may still exist, and a photographic record reduces disputes rather than eliminating them.
Liability, stated honestly
Nothing here excludes responsibility for personal injury caused by negligence or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. Beyond that, responsibility for any loss arising from the use of the guidance on this site is confined to the amount you have paid for the service in question.
In particular, no responsibility is accepted for charges levied by a hire company, for deductions from a deposit, for the outcome of a dispute with a rental desk, or for a decision to buy or not to buy a vehicle. These pages are intended to help you ask better questions, and the decisions that follow remain yours.
Changes to these pages
The guides are revised whenever something in them stops being accurate, and these conditions may be revised along with them. The version published at the time you read the site is the one that applies to your reading of it, and the version in force when a booking is confirmed is the one that applies to that booking.
No notice of a revision is sent, because there is no mailing list and no subscriber record. If a condition matters to you, print or save it at the time of booking. Any material change to a booked arrangement is communicated to you directly rather than through a quiet edit to a page.
The law that applies
These conditions and anything arising from them are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, and the courts of the Emirate of Dubai have jurisdiction over any dispute that cannot be settled between us.
Before that point is reached, a telephone call is strongly preferred. Almost every disagreement of this kind comes from a misunderstanding about what was included, and almost all of them are resolved in ten minutes by two people reading the same written outline together.