AliceL

I am trying to book a rental car for my trip to South Africa next week and I would like to go into Swaziland. The best deal I have found is about 270 GBP on Car Hire 3000. (We need an automatic transmission so we have to pay more). We called to ask how much more they would charge to allow us to enter Swaziland and they quoted us a fee of 5000 Rand! I am not sure if I misunderstood but this seems crazy. I know people on this board have rented cars and driven into Swaziland. Are there any car rental companies that offer automatic transmission that you can recommend who would charge a more reasonable price to take the car into Swaziland?

Alice

colind

Most of the big companies do not charge for Swaziland providing you do not plan to drop it there.

Kavey

Incase you haven't come across all of these, this is the list I contacted when we were researching our 2004 trip back in 2003.

www.auto-europe.co.uk
www.rentacar-southafrica.com
www.drivesouthafrica.net
www.europcar.co.za
www.rentacar-worldwide.com
www.africarhire.com
www.avis.com
www.alamo.com
www.hertz.com
www.tempestcarhire.com
www.budget.com
www.valuerentalcar.com

Some things to take into account:

Some companies do not allow to you to reduce the excess you must pay incase of damage/ accident even with the extra insurance fee and some have extremely high excess charges. I'd definitely check this.

Check charges for extra drivers, one way drop of fees, an extra spare tyre (if you want such, we did), administration/ booking fees, whether you are expected to return the car with full or empty tank, whether you have unlimited mileage (if you aren't planning to drive huge distances perhaps you can get cheaper rates with limited mileage deals), and, as you have mentioned, charge to take the car into Swaziland.

hanl

In 2003 we drove through Swaziland (spending one night there) with a car we'd hired in S.A. and were't charged any supplement.

We were told we'd need an authorisation letter from the car hire company that we'd need to show at the border, but in the event, nobody even gave our car a second glance or asked for any special documentation. It wouldn't hurt to make sure you have such a letter though, just in case.

hanl

Oops, meant to mention we'd hired the car from Avis.

Kavey

We went through some fairly careful security checks when we went through Swaziland - including checking the serial number of the engine against central records (they made a call to do this) and checking our rental documents fairly carefully. We were also strongly advised to fill in the forms on leaving SA/ entering Swaziland to register our expensive camera gear as we might find ourselves stripped of it or charged duty for it on re-entering SA if we couldn't prove we had it on exit - there's a problem with fake or non-duty-paid goods coming in to SA via Swaziland, apparently, though not quite sure how!