Car Hire in Croatia, any recommendations?
 

We would like to hire a car for 3 days.
We would be travelling from Ljubljana to Zagreb (either by train or bus) and want to travel on to Plitvice Lakes and then onto Split.

Our thoughts were to pick a car in Zagreb around 12pm and drive onto Plitvice Lakes and stay either 1 or 2 nights and then drive to Sibernik or straight to Split.
I have heard some conflicting views on car hire in Croatia and would like to hear from others for their recommendations and experiences, either good or bad.

I think most of them are fine, just make sure you carefully read the terms and look for things such as cross border fee for driving in other countries. Also for Slovenia you need to buy a vignette if you want to drive on the highway.

People tend to share negative experiences out of frustration and not the positive ones. Don't worry too much about it imo.

My limited experiencies: I recently wrote about Active Rent Split, would rent with them again. Rented with Sixt in Ljubljana 2 years ago, good experience. Spanish companies such as Goldcar - you may want to avoid them.

Nvm about the cross border fee, since you are not planning to drive to Slovenia.

I used Kemwel and found a car through them. We didn't encounter any problems and they allowed us to drive the car into Bosnia.

I made my arrangements through gemut.com (which I strongly recommend); they work with autoeurope.

Thank you for your comments........I was originally looking at hiring a car in Ljubljana but the cross border fees was 600euro. So that is why we will bus or train to Zagreb.

I was all set to book the car and then read lots of negative reports so changed tack and then looked at using buses. But of course we would be limited by timetables. Our trip is in June.

I believe that most car rental companies will block a large amount on your credit card if you do not take their full insurance. Is that most peoples experience?

For renting in Croatia, my credit card's insurance was, IIRC, sufficient -- I suspect that it varies with CC company, country of origin, and who knows what else.

In addition to providing excellent service, gemut.com offers a free information guide to renting cars in Europe -- I strongly recommend it.

From my limited experience, they do usually block a large amount, typically 600-1500€ regardless of length of stay, as a deposit. Unless you take their overpriced insurance. As long as you have insurance via your CC company or a third party insurance for covering this excess amount then you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Cross border fee should be at most 100€, so 600€ is too much imo. One way drop off in another country could be expensive though so I think train or bus is a good solution for that part. I'd recommend a car for the rest though.

Sorry for double posting. To give you an idea: We rented with Active Rent Croatia. Deposit was 600€ (should have been 800€ but they made a mistake as we got a higher class car). We had a pretty rough trip so to say, 750€ damage to the car. We paid, they unblocked the deposit. Our insurance (icarhire via Allianz) covered the full amount including exchange rate (783€ in total). We pay 70€ per year for this insurance.

Thanks for your replies.
kja I will look into Gumet, I appreciate the suggestion and recommendation.

FlyDriveHike, thanks for your recommendation as well.
Yes I think a renting a car instead of trying to do the buses would give us better flexibility its a shame it is for such a short time but we will not need a car once we reach Split as we will have a 7 sailing day sailing trip.