Personally Chosen

Car insurance companies always seem to have incredibly optimistic views about how well we know what we do with the car, don’t they?

Sometimes seemingly simple questions from them mean that you effectively have to make up the answer. For instance, if you’re looking for student car insurance, are you actually a student? Since you can drive from age 17 what do you call yourself for those two years prior to university? You’re still at school but are you a student? At the other end of the scale what about those of us doing part-time degrees? Is it valid to put ourselves down as students too?

Then there’s the complication of where you park the car overnight. Is it always in the garage or mostly in the driveway?

But the hardest question has to be: how many miles are you going to drive next year? I’m sure that for many people it’s a complete guess.

However, what if they didn’t need to trust just how good a driver you are but could check it for themselves? Finally, technology has come to their aid with what’s effectively a home version of the in-cab monitors that lorries have used for years. This can do things like keep a record of how far you really travel, what the mix of journies is like, where you’re going and how fast you drive. Although this should allow “good” drivers to get lower quotes in time I suspect that it’ll be a while before the insurance companies get a handle on what exactly a “good” driver does so don’t expect massive drops in insurance costs immediately.

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.