Current car rental hacks

My goodness car hire in Europe can be horrifically expensive, especially during the peak summer period. We have a future house sit in the very small village of Trdkova in Slovenia in mid May. One can survive without a car but one of the reasons we chose this sit is Slovenia is meant to be so very scenic and we want to explore. Trdkova can be accessed by taxi or by a daily 6am bus that is 3km from the house sit.

We are flying into Vienna – this deserves another post on flight hacks! Adu looked extensively at available cars in Vienna and also Lbujljana (we will spend a night or two here as it’s a great city and I want to visit Lake Bled). He found car hire for around around 1000 Euro for 2,5 weeks. Oh my goodness! He also looked at Graz in Austria.

I love rome2rio. It gives great ideas on car, bus, and flight options between two cities. I made a note of the different stops between Vienna and Ljubljana. I looked at both bus and train routes.

This is crucial as one needs to be able to get to the car hire place easily. Maribo and Hodos both jumped out as bigger cities and the possible car hire place. Maribo seemed to have available cars at a more reasonable price. I then checked that we would be able to get from Maribor back to Trdkova, even if we needed to catch a local taxi for the last bit.

I also REALLY looked at the calendar as to when we would want a car. We won’t travel every day and we can perhaps reduce the time of car hire. I teach online on Saturdays and Mondays. So we reduced the car hire by four days, making our car dropoff a Thursday. We ended up booking a hire car for 499 Euro!

TO SUMMARISE:

1. Change your starting point.
2. Look for other big cities nearby that you could hire from.
3. See if you can reduce the number of days you need a car.  Make sure you can get from where you drop the car off by local transport to where you need to be .

Sometimes it is just not possible to get a reasonable cost car. The longer you can book in advance the better ! Another helpful hints is to use a site that searches across car rental properties. We often use carjet.  Last thought – if there are dents or scratches on the car the take a photo with your phone so you have proof that it was there before hand!