How to choose car rental in Europe

What are our criteria ?
     Based on our experiences :

1. Automatic car.

• In Europe, it's left-hand driving, as compared to right-hand driving for Singapore. So having an automatic car saves you quite a hassle in adapting to a left-hand drive.

2. Check the no of free kms given per day of car rental. 

• Depending on the distance you will cover, you will need to take these into consideration. The usual no. given by car rental companies is about 250 km/day, and if you exceed the total given over the duration of your rental, you will have to pay per km.
• The no. given is usually enough, unless you are doing a lot of travelling over long distances.

3. The sizing of the car.

• Depending on your needs and suitcases, you have to determine what kind of car you need to transport everyone and the luggage.

4. The location of the car rental company at the airport.

• If it's at the airport terminal, very good.
• If it's off-site, you might want to consider a car rental company that's on-site since you don't want to lug your suitcases just to get your rental car. It will not be that convenient moving from point A to point B overseas.
• Some people actually advise against getting rental car at the airport as it's more expensive. So imagine you arrive at the airport and that to get to your rental office downtown, where it may be cheaper, you still have to make your way there with your family and your suitcases. Why the hassle and the inconvenience ?
• When people say it's expensive, you also have to take it with a pinch of salt. Where do they get their prices, from which website, car rental supplier, etc. ? Are we talking about apples and apples ?

5. Paying option to reduce excess.

• This depends on your travel insurance coverage for excess and how comfortable you are with its coverage.

6. Paying cross-border fee.

• Some car rental companies charge a daily fee, so it's expensive and it doesn't make sense.
• With rentalcars.com, and subsequently the rental company Global Drive, I paid only 20€ for the entire trip.

7. Renting a GPS with the rental company

• It's costly and charged per day.
• The GPS may not be intuitive enough to use or good in giving navigational instructions. For example, for the car rental from Frankfurt, it was a very hi-tech car and equipped with a GPS. However, we abandoned it quickly as it does not tell you properly how to navigate in certain complex areas. We switched quickly to our Garmin GPS to continue.

8. Where to book ?

• rentalcars.com
• EconomyBookings.com
• Read car rental reviews on the internet. There will always be positive and negative reviews, so be prepared to avoid pitfalls when renting a car.

9. Personal Experiences.

• In my experiences with Europe or Australia, I have never booked directly online with Avis, Budget, etc... because they do not offer good prices.

At Paris CDG

• We used EconomyBookings.com.
• We took an option to reduce our excess to zero, and even then it was cheap, and also because it was also our first time driving in Europe.
• At Paris CDG, we had to ask and move around to find the car rental company Enterprise after getting our luggage, but it was not far.
• No issues with Enterprise after we returned home.

At Frankfurt Airport

• We used rentalcars.com.
• We took up an option with rentalcars.com to reduce our excess to zero, and even then it didn't cost much.
• We hired a car with unlimited kms, which is not available on their website, but which we negotiated with their helpdesk.
• At Frankfurt Airport, most of the car rental companies are located at Terminal 2, so once you get your luggage, it's convenient. Note that the car rental company CARO is not on-site.
• We had booked our car for 1300 hrs. When we went to the Global Drive (Buchbinder) counter at 1200 hrs, we were informed that our car wasn't ready, and that a bigger car at additional 10€ a day was available. Well, we waited.
• They would swipe your credit card for a deposit, to protect their excess coverage, if you did not buy this coverage from them.
• When we finally retrieved our car in the basement parking lot, we realised that we had been given a much bigger car, not the compact car that I had booked.
• What we deduced is that they didn't have the car we wanted and that they weren't kind nor gracious enough to let me have the bigger car upgrade at no additional cost.
• After returning home, Buchbinder returned us the deposit, however with a deduction for extra mileage (ours was for unlimited mileage) and cross-border fees (which was already paid upon getting our car). We are now disputing with them to refund us the actual amount.

Update : After providing Buchbinder with our car rental voucher from rentalcars.com and disputing the double charge on the cross-border fees, they finally refunded us the intial 1100€ deposit after 2 weeks.

• In countries like Australia, normally, the car rental company would offer you an upgrade car if the car requested is not available, at no extra cost.