Today I take you through 5 steps to the best car rental experience.
NUMBER ONE
Go with well known/trust company. This way you'll know the level of service to expect and you'll have the backing of a large worldwide company if anything goes wrong.
NUMBER TWO
Comparison websites. Vital so you can compare multiple car rental companies for the same dates/location together saving you lots of time. Also, some car rental companies are in alliances, like with the Toyota I rented in this video, I rented it through the Alamo website, but collected from Enterpise. If i had booked through enterpise it would have been £30 more expensive. Worth noting!
NUMBER THREE
Flexible on pickup location. Airports will always be the most expensive due to taxes etc. If you can collect from a city centre location such as a train station which is what I did here. By doing this I actually saved over 50%!
NUMBER FOUR
Excess waiver insurance. This is probably one of the most important points of my video today and also where car hire companies make the majority of their money. If you book a car rental for say £90 and then arrive to collect your car, they'll attempt to sell you their excess waiver insurance. Whilst the cars are fully insured, you'll be liable to pay up to £1000 if you have an accident or the vehicle is damaged. Excess waiver insurance means you'll be fully covered so you will not need to pay up to £1000 if the vehicle is damaged. This issue here is the cover which the car rental company offers is hugely inflated, often double the price of the vehicle rental. Instead, book with a third party provider before you go. You'll get the same level of cover by only pay a fraction more. In this example I paid £9 with Quester for excess waiver insurance for my 5 day rental.
NUMBER FIVE
Admin. There's a few additional points to note, vital for good value car hire. Check the car thoroughly before leaving and if there are ANY marks on the car inside or outside, make sure these are registered on the rental agreement. If not, you could be liable to pay on return, as you will not be able to prove these were on the car before your rental started. Nasty I know, but business is business. Do thorough checks! Next of all, on time return. Make sure you return your rental at the stated time, or else you could be liable to pay another day, not useful! Next of all, FUEL policy! Make sure you get FULL to FULL. It's become popular with car rental companies to offer full to empty, but you'll have to prepay the fuel beforehand. Don't do this, as you'll get an awful rate, and most likely find it challenging to return the car empty. With full to full just return the car as you collected it, with a full tank of fuel. Simple.
Lastly and I appreciate this only applies to the UK viewers out there! The DVLA (driving authority) provide a license code which you should register for before leaving the UK. This means that the car hire company can request this code to ensure you're legally allowed to drive. This is a new requirement which came into effect in June 2015, and many are not aware. Whilst only 1 - 2 % of companies ask for this, it's best to do so as failure to provide this upon request will void the rental. What's more it's free and instantaneous online and takes just a few minutes to do.
Some helpful links for you:
- TrekTrendy.com
- AutoEurope.com
- Skyscanner.net
- Quester.co.uk