Traveling in Europe with a rental car, couldn’t it be easier? Think again! When traveling by rental car in Europe, we are not always as far-sighted as we should be. Improvisation, last-minute searches dominate travellers’ practices. However, traveling in Europe with a rental car cannot be improvised and requires a few precautions and reminders of common sense. Here are some tips and tricks for traveling well by rental car in Europe.
When traveling by rental car, several solutions are available to travelers to make their reservations. Book online, use a rental agency directly on site or request a travel agency as an intermediary, in order to manage the entire transaction and take care of the practical questions which can be very time-consuming and tedious if you want to avoid mistakes and setbacks.
Today, the Internet provides tourists with a large number of offers in France, Europe and around the world.
Compare across multiple sites to check the best deals
travel in europe with a rental carIn a few clicks, you will find all the possible offers for a given period, all classified according to price, insurance, relevance of the offer, type of car for example. Price comparison sites and intermediary portals that reference thousands of offers are very practical and useful for finding the best offer, but be careful, however, of the reservations made.
The prices of rental cars vary from one site to another, but especially from one minute to another; especially in high season in high-traffic destinations . Do not wait until the last minute for your reservations on this type of destination, because the prices are much more expensive than if you plan ahead and book several weeks or months in advance, with a free cancellation option .
If the comparators’ offers appear in a few seconds, don’t get out of the habit of carefully consulting the details of the offers and not the summary version which only condenses three or four basic pieces of information.such as price, car model and deductible value. Often, we stick to these summaries to better compare the offers on the same page, but the devil being in the details, we find ourselves faced with unpleasant surprises such as the absence of very important insurance, the options and taxes not included, prohibitions which may be imposed on vehicles in certain countries, bordering in particular countries which do not belong to the European Union, without forgetting the specific requests which must be made when booking under penalty of not be able to obtain authorization from the car rental agency.
IP tracking; a fearsome snitch that tracks your searches
In addition, some sites practice ip tracking, namely the tracing of the visitor from his ip. More and more comparison sites and agency sites are using this method to spy on visitors and act on their buying intentions. They therefore do not fail to modify the prices upwards for the same search, in order to force the customer to buy, by letting him believe that the prices will increase and that it is in his interest to block a reservation! However, to confirm the confidence that you can have in a site, you can try to check the prices with another medium (for example a telephone) which does not use the same ip and which will allow you to see if you can consider the prices or if the site uses ip tracking to influence prices. If you search for the same destination (or not) with the same ip, you may still get a higher price. These data being kept for several days or weeks, the only solution to obtain the initial price will be to change the ip address or the medium of your search.
Distrust of price comparators
Above all, take the trouble to compare the offers on several sites , including when you use a price comparator or an intermediary portal . Indeed, each comparator establishes special partnerships and the offers for the same rental company can vary from one site to another, with exceptional promotions. Each site also practices its conditions of sale and use, therefore, take the time to read these conditions carefully before making a reservation to know your rights and obligations, the possibility of cancellation, the inherent costs…
