Car Rental
 

What rental car company would you recommend for cheap prices in France or Europe in general?

I seem to get the best price through kemwel.com who is a consolidator. Or you can try their sister company, autoeurope.com. Both companies will match any lower price that you find. All of my rentals with them have been with Europcar.

Try novacarhire.com to get some competitive prices (they are a British consolidator) and I agree with the above - Kemwell and AutoEurope. If you are going for 17 days or longer, I recommend a lease with Peugeot or Renault (through Kemwell or Autoeurope if you like). I just did a lease buy back this past September and it is definately the way to go. Cheaper and full insurance coverage.

It depends on where you are renting where you are dropping off and what type of car you want. You really need to investigate based on your specifics. (We usually do Hertz - but have super special corporate discounts).

Depending on the type of car you are willing to drive (shift or automatic), the lease might be more expensive than a rental, especially if you carry the CDW on your credit card. Comparisons are always in order.

Factors which one should keep in mind while booking a car are:-
1) Website must authenticate and use secure gateways for payments. Try to explore more about it in the forums like this one. Generally, if I come across something suspicious about the website I give it a skip, as it could spoil my travel trip.
2) The price factor. It should provide economic cars on competitive low rates.
3) Next is the service they provide. Also the extra offers and discounts they give.
I have short listed some of the sites that provide all what you need to enjoy your trip. You can browse http://rentalcarsuk.net/ and http://www.usacarsrental.com/ and can even book a car for your trip.

Many people do not know that they can check all of the various sites of www.autoeurope.com using the various country suffixes (www.autoeurope.fr or .es or .be or .it or any of the others) and choose the site that offers the lowest rate. For example, for a car rental in France, depending on the category of car and length of rental, it is often cheaper to go through the Spanish or Belgian site.

My own company has a corporate rate with Europcar, but I use the German version of the site for my rentals in France, because I get a much better rate. The people at the Europcar desk have confirmed to me that this is indeed the thing to do to get better rates -- even though some of them have told me that they get even cheaper rates than their employee discount (30%) through the Spanish AutoEurope site when they want to rent a car for 3 weeks or a month.

To add some confusion, try also this consolidator (which has all insurances included): http://holidayautos.de/

Nancy, after you have tried all options, please tell us which one won.

We found that what Kerouac mentioned was true for Avis, as well.

We used Avis through http://www.bonjourlafrance.com/ to rent a nice Volvo for 12 days, pickup at the TGV station near Tours and returned at CDG for hundreds less than we found with Avis (US) and the major European agencies.

Everything went exactly as you would expect at a "first-tier" rental company corporate site. No problems on either end.