I booked a Mercedes-AMG SL 63 through SIXT for arrival at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, described on…read moretheir own website as a guaranteed car. I prepaid 1,300 euros a full week before my trip. That money was debited from my account within seconds. No hesitation on their side when it came to collecting.
Twenty four hours before I was due to pick up the car, I received a short, cold email. My reservation had been cancelled and refunded. No reason. No phone call. No apology. I rang SIXT Germany immediately to understand what had happened, and the agent on the phone was openly rude, dismissive, and unwilling to offer a single explanation. That was the moment I understood this was never about the car. It was about me.
Refusing to let someone's private bias ruin a family trip, I went back on their website and rebooked the same car at 1,500 euros, a premium for daring to still want what I had already wanted and paid for.
When I landed in Berlin with my wife and walked up to the counter, the agent looked me in the eye and said, without shame, that my original booking had been cancelled because "many things did not add up". What exactly did not add up? According to him, my email ended in '@yahoo.co.uk', while I am a resident of France. That was the evidence. A domain name. among other things.
What followed was not a rental handover. It was an interrogation wrapped in bad jokes. Why did I want an AMG? Could I pick another car? Could he see my return ticket? Why was I flying economy class if I could afford a car like this? How did I come about a black credit card? What were my plans in Berlin? He laughed with his colleague between questions, visibly enjoying himself, clearly hoping that I would crack or that my card would decline. At one point he said, to my face, that I was lucky I met him, because none of his colleagues would have released the car to me.
I took the car for one reason. To prove a single point. You cannot read a man by the font on his email, and you cannot measure a life by the surname on his passport. He had already written my story in his head before I opened my mouth. I made sure the ending embarrassed him.
This is not a service failure. This is profiling. A guaranteed booking gets silently cancelled. A prepayment gets reversed without explanation. A paying customer is questioned about his flight class, his credit card colour, and his travel plans as if the SIXT counter at Berlin Airport had been upgraded into a border checkpoint. A counter agent and his manager, acting as judge, jury, and border guard and based on a name and a face, will eventually decide who deserves to drive a Mercedes SL 63 and who does not.
And here is the part SIXT will not recover from. I returned the car in perfect condition. Not a scratch. Not a mark. Not a complaint. Then I told them, calmly, that the AMG they had decided belonged only to a certain kind of customer is in fact my personal daily car back home in France. I drive one like it to work, to school runs, and to the supermarket. The very vehicle their agent grilled me over, insured against me, and waited for my card to decline on sits on my driveway. I did not need SIXT to taste an AMG. I needed SIXT to understand who they had been talking down to. I dropped the key on the counter, turned to my wife, and walked out to catch my economy flight back to France, laughing with her about how loud that AMG truly sounds when you open it up on a German autobahn and how small that counter had looked in the rearview mirror.
The economy seat they mocked flew us home. Unlike SIXT, Air France measured safety over colour of skin. The AMG they questioned is parked outside my house. And SIXT has lost a customer for life. Not in Berlin. Not in Germany. Not anywhere on the map.
À bientôt.
