Cheap car hire article discussion

MENDIPS

Recommend MALAGACAR at the airport. Golf auto 8 days @ £280 .full cover.Half tank return policy. Quick shuttle to booking office.

jimarnold_2

to be clear autoeurope are a broker - ie intermediary - your car hire won't be with them and my experience with such brokers is that they will be as much use as a chocolate teapot if you run into problems - a cursory check of their website offers A WEEK with click rent of £1 !!!!! while they charge £149 if you book with AVIS for the same car !
Does that not tell you something ??
TANSTAAFL = There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch !!

The broker isn't important the hire company is !

codger

We're just back from Spain's Almeria coast, the concluding week of an extensive tour of Spain by train and plane. We booked a week's car hire with Hertz via booking agents Rhino, itself part of a much larger broker-conglomerate. (We generally tend to book direct with the majors when and if a decent discount can be obtained; when it can't, we use Rhino, because its representation of Hertz, Avis, Alamo and Dollar has always worked well for us in our American journeyings.)

Although we didn't actually fly into Almeria, but came by train from Madrid for a couple of day's lazing around, we inadvertently finished up arriving to collect our Hertz rental from the airport desk at the same time as Gold Car customers from a newly arrived flight were collecting theirs.

I can't speak for the quality of the cars Goldcar was offering; I can speak for the length of the queue.

We paid £178 up front, via Rhino, for what turned out to be a gorgeous 3-week old / 900 kilometres-on-the-clock Renault Captur, complete with full tank of petrol. It was immaculate inside and out, spacious, comfortable, great to drive as only a mini-MPV can be, and ah! That new-car smell . . .

Hertz desk staff were superb. The didn't even ask to look at the Excess Insurance annual cover we have. All they asked was that we return the car with the same full tank as received.

The math here might, on the face of it, seem expensive: the Captur worked out at a hire rate of a little over £25 per day. And yet, and yet: that seems to us to be a not unreasonable charge for the use of a new vehicle costing around £16,000 in the UK.

As frequent travellers, we're well used to the exhortations of seeming bargain-basement outfits (and their brokers) luring in the punters with downright ludicrous hire prices, sometimes as little as a quid or two per day. Naive customers who fall for this have only themselves to blame when it all goes wrong: no car hire firm, not even an outfit hiring out mobile wrecks, can make a profit from so small a daily rate.

Moral: peace of mind is priceless, and £25 a day to ensure that is but a small amount, a very small amount, especially when what you're getting isn't something which you have to exhaustively photograph every last scratch and ding but is pristine, honest, and honestly rented.

If only people would wake up to the fact that everything has a price, and that one way or another, that price has to be paid, there'd be a lot less grief for so many out there . . .:(

richardw

£25 a day for a Captur! Bargain, great money saving there.
That's a lot of car for the money.

codger

richardw wrote: »

£25 a day for a Captur! Bargain, great money saving there.
That's a lot of car for the money.

Indeed it was, Richard. We enjoyed every moment with it.

What I really want to get across to MSErs is not to think that just because the major rental companies are oriented towards folks on expense accounts to whom daily rates don't much matter as they're not picking up the bill, bargains can frequently be had from those exact same companies, either directly or via their appointed brokers.

In this case, Hertz Almeria provided that £16,000+ car at a substantial discount on its normal rate, a discount not available at Hertz itself but offered via its broker, Rhino. As noted, we prefer to book direct rather than use third-party agencies, but we've used Rhino for many years and never encountered a problem over a cumulative umpteen 1,000s of miles driven across the USA and Continental Europe.

It was thanks to Rhino's customer email that we were made aware of a then "48 Hour Hertz Sale" -- though to be honest, such so-called sales are anything but infrequent. Needless to add, we have absolutely no connection with Hertz or Rhino other than as satisfied customers of longstanding.

PS: just an additional note for anyone here who may be considering car hire in Spain this year.

Hertz, we now learn, has invested heavily with Renault Spain, which assembles the delightful Captur at its Valladolid plant. The Captur comes with an excellent in-built Sat Nav, a feature that's an expensive chargeable extra on many another hire car and the reason why we always pack our Garmin for overseas trips. As ever, we lugged the Garmin and its cabling with us on this latest odyssey, realising too late that we need never have bothered.

As you rightly say, £25 a day for a new car including in-built SatNav was definitely a Best Buy!

locky123

RangerChris wrote: »

It is optional. I always buy stand alone annual car insurance cover for this though. Much cheaper.

Looking at car hire in Italy and using autoeurope, find that prices are much lower using their .com site in dollars compared to .co.uk, and cant see any difference in what's included.

Is there a huge risk in booking this way?

AlSto

locky123 wrote: »

Looking at car hire in Italy and using autoeurope, find that prices are much lower using their .com site in dollars compared to .co.uk, and cant see any difference in what's included.

Is there a huge risk in booking this way?

Check that CDW is included when using the US website.

locky123

AlSto wrote: »

Check that CDW is included when using the US website.

CDW is mandatory when driving in Italy, so must be included as no other option.

AlSto

locky123 wrote: »

Looking at car hire in Italy and using autoeurope, find that prices are much lower using their .com site in dollars compared to .co.uk, and cant see any difference in what's included.

Is there a huge risk in booking this way?

No risk. Just make sure that you have stand-alone car hire excess insurance cover.

mustafa

Top tip. Do not hire from Do You Spain, Interrent, Auto-Europe unless you have money to throw away. Any problems report to Credit Card and to
https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/consumers/resolve-your-consumer-complaint/european-consumer-centres-network_en
When you are told to read the terms and conditions you will not be suprised when Auto-Europe T&C's have 4,632 words to read and understand. Interrent's T&C's I would sent it to the solicitors IT HAS 32,365 words.