Car drop off Florence? Or Milan?
 

Good evening - hoping to get some advice on car hire drop off . We plan on picking up a car in Rome (probably FCO as they have more automatic vehicles available - yes I can drive a manual, but my husband can't and refuses to learn, and I am sick of doing all the driving in Europe!). We will drive to Chianti, spend 5 days there around San Casciagno (sp?) and then have to go to Milan for work. I'm reluctant to drive into Milan or Florence, and was considering dropping the car in Florence, and getting the train up to Milan. How easy would this be? From memory the car hire places had offices near SMN, but is that just going to be stressful. I also looked at dropping outside Florence, getting a local train to Florence, changing to the intercity but seems a lot of stuffing around with luggage, connections etc. Or we could drop at Milan Linate airport. Thoughts please?

The airport might be the best solution in terms of ease: no driving in city traffic, no worries about ZTLs.

Driving and dropping IN Milan might be a lot easier than even Linate or Malpensa. I've dropped in Florence and yes they are near SMN and we had no trouble but we knew exactly where to drive, too. Up to you but if you drop at Linate you can get a cab into the city; if at Malpensa you can take the rail connection.

Thank you!
 

Thanks for this advice - gratefully received! It looks as though Hertz might have the best located offices in Milan if we wish to avoid driving too far into the city!

A few weeks ago, we dropped a car off at the Florence airport, and we found it difficult to find the return location. It can get easy to consume your fuel fill-up if you miss the correct turn a couple times. We were saved on our second effort when a security official near the terminal was madly motioning us to move out. We pointed to our iPhone and google maps. He came over, grabbed our phone, inputted the correct spot and, thankfully, we were then able to find the odd location. A week earlier, we had picked up the car at Malpensa, and it was easy to drive out of there. We actually booked three cars in various segments of our recent European trip (Italian Riviera, Sardinia and France), and all were booked via Auto Europe. Since they are a broker, two were with Hertz, one with Europcar, and all were smooth and much better deals than if we had booked directly with the car rental agencies.

one note from a personal experience with an airport car rental in Europe. I would suggest that you take a photo of your rental car when you pick it up on all 4 sides. We We picked up a rental car in Zurich for about 2 weeks, returned it to Geneva to fly out. We did not have a scratch on it, and absolutley no accident.. The rental agency, a major one, tried to claim that we had an accident with the car, we did not, there was not a mark on it. Unfortunately we had to make a flght, returned the car to airport, and were a bit close on time to make the flight. We did try to dispute this charge, and I think our major credit card did make some settlement. We felt it was a scam and they got away with it, but we did not take before/after pics. Might consider this. this was many years ago, so hope this is not going on now.

We dropped off our Hertz at MXP in May. Easy to take train into the city. Not too difficult with GPS to get to MXP.