Car rental in France

No specific comments, but if you are looking at automatics, renting manual transmissions is normally way way less in Europe

Definitely not looking at auto, actually kindof looking forward to driving around a little manual, although it will mean wifey won't be sharing in the driving duties ;-)

I've rented in Avignon twice and haven't found it to be that outrageous. I can't remember what rental company we used, but I seem to recall about e1000 for a week for a minivan. Yes, that's more than here, but it's not crazy. We're about to rent a 9 seater van at Fiumicino (Rome Airport), and it's about 850gbpounds for the week.

I have rented cars twice this year in Europe... the car is cheap, it is the insurance.

w+a is right on. IIRC we had to pay for insurance because our insurer doesn't cover us when we're driving in Europe. On the one or two occasions over the last 10 years when I had to rent on a business trip it was comparable to here because my company insures it.

I've used Hertz and the local companies (Europcar). Both have been fine.

Don't leave anything in the car.

I've done it three six times in the last few years and will do it three times this summer. If you have an American Express card, consider their primary auto insurance, unless you're renting in Italy or Ireland. Never had a problem.

I think I figured out what the problem was... I was looking to rent for 1 or 2 days and kept getting really high rates; called in to Europcar and they said that all the vendors have a 3-day minimum, so inputting anything less than that on the websites will have a much higher per day rate as they basically don't want to rent for periods that short. Tried it out on several sites and sure enough, renting for 3 days turned out to be cheaper than just renting for 1-2 days... lesson learned.
Thank you for all the feedback, much appreciated as always.

Renting a car in Europe is definitely more expensive than in NA. I've always relied on the insurance on my credit card and declined the rental companies. W+A, I can't believe you don't have a card which insures you.

The cost of the rental is one thing, wait until you put gas into it.

quote:

Originally posted by steve8:
Renting a car in Europe is definitely more expensive than in NA. I've always relied on the insurance on my credit card and declined the rental companies. W+A, I can't believe you don't have a card which insures you.

The cost of the rental is one thing, wait until you put gas into it.

Steve, our corporate card/cards have severe limits on specific places out of the U.S.

We found out the hard way in places like Mexico, Rome, Ireland ( ) the Far East and many others.

The last two times I rented cars in El Paso and San Diego, I had to sign separate paperwork that I would not take the car into Mexico unless buying special insurance.