Personally Chosen

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I’m terribly stingy when it comes to hiring a car. Whenever I can, I spend the time to go through all the car hire companies operating in the airport that I’m flying to because their deals change at different times.

Yet, every single time that I’ve done that recently I’ve ended up with Holiday Autos.

They’re not really a “proper” car rental firm in that you won’t find a sign in the airport saying “Holiday Autos desk” and that’s what keeps their prices low. Whereas Hertz, Avis, Europcar and the rest are paying for people to staff their offices (and each one has thousands of offices) and to buy enough cars to be able to offer you things like a guarantee of having a car, all that Holiday Autos do is negotiate a bulk hire rate and pass the savings on to you. I say “all” but, of course, that’s hard enough I’m sure.

One of the interesting things I found is that although Europcar are normally the outfit that supplies their cars around Europe, it costs more to hire the same car directly from Europcar and the terms of the rental aren’t as good either. For example, I wanted to do a one way drop off once: the Holiday Autos price was 30€/day for the car whilst the Europcar rate was 50€/day AND there was a 100€ dropoff charge from Europcar vs none from Holiday Autos.

Anyway, save yourself both time and money and just book with Holiday Autos. Just be sure to book well in advance as they do sell out of the very best offers quite early.