confused about car hire

emma.cook3

I am trying to book a car for a week in majorca in April. I looked on travelsupermarket and found several cars for £20 a week. This cant be right. I then tried to add car seats for the children. I couldnt add them on one site, the other said it would be £100 a week to hire the seats. The insurance was only 3rd party and the excess was huge.
What should I be looking for when I get car hire with regards to child seats, insurance and excess?
Thanks

NiftyDigits

Expect to pay around £200 a week for a decent car with car seat.

£20 per week? Really? Do you think they would let you walk away after paying £20? The 'Extras' will make your eyes water.

SW17

Ok to get an idea of options and prices from a comparison site, but better to go direct. There are many options, but the firm I use is a local one called Autos Roig. Won't necessarily be the cheapest, but competitive, their pricing is transparent, service is good and they don't make you buy a tank of fuel.

Most of the companies (including Roig) will have a large excess on the car insurance and encourage you to buy their excess waiver insurance. The more reputable companies will be transparent about the cost of this and may in some cases allow you to book it up front.

If you have a particular company in mind from the prices you've researched, suggest you post the name and someone on here will be able to give you the benefit of their experience.

bagand96

Most companies will charge a very cheap price but make it up in extras.

Fuel Policy: Many operate "Full to Empty" which means when you pick up the car you will pay them for the full tank of fuel which is in the car. They'll say "bring it back empty". If you don't use the whole tank you often don't get any refund so you've paid for fuel you haven't used. They'll charge the next customer the same and therefore make a lot of money from charging people for unused fuel.

Insurance Excess: Most companies will try and sell you their own insurance excess policy. If you don't take it, then they'll ask for a huge deposit on your credit card (sometimes many hundreds of euros). You can of course take their policy but it will probably be over priced. You can arrange car hire excess insurance very cheaply on-line. Note you would still have to put the large deposit down, and if anything happened you'd claim it back from your own excess insurance.

Auto-Europe is a very good site that is transparent about fuel policy and gives you the option to filter based on that as well as insurance options.

andycris3107

Take a look here:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/5117505

Obviously_the_best

For Mallorca, look at the guys in the link below. They're a local, reliable hire firm, who charge realistic prices. I've used them a few times myself. Full to full fuel, extra insurance isn't too much either, and chair hire doesn't look too bad (although compared to the price of the rest of the car, still not great value)

http://www.hiperrentacar.com/en/

Do make sure you read all the small print though.

Property_Investor

I recently compiled a list of some of the bigger car hire companies. Here they are:

Alamo, Avis, Budget, Enterprise, Europcar, Hertz, National, Thrifty

If you are going to visit their websites directly as someone else suggested and you are using Google Chrome, I suggest you install an app called Car Hire Aid, it helps save time with filling in form details (e.g. location, dates, times) over and over again. Check out the link below for a pic/video demo.

As I cant add links here, to install the app, search for 'google web store' in google, then on the webstore page search for 'car hire aid'