Do you know of a reputable car rental service in Italy? (Or can you suggest a good review site?) We need to rent from the Pisa Airport. On TravelersDigest.com and ReviewCentre.com, there are horror stories about everyone from Hertz to Europcar to Avis. We just want to find a service that will give fair rates for an automatic car, without any surprise fees. Thanks!

AutoEurope

We've also had good experiences with SIXT rental car.

Hi
I second autoeurope. They are a wholsaler working with various car rental agencies. Just as an afterthought car rental prices in Italy were higher than other countries.

Hi C,

Also www.gemut.com and www.novacarhire.com

>car rental prices in Italy were higher than other countries.<

That's because CDW is required.

You also are required to have an International Driver's Permit, available from www.aaasouth.com/travel_drivers.asp#idp

Thanks everyone, for your input!

I'd gotten a reservation through AutoEurope. Turns out that the car itself comes from Eurocar (which has numerous complants against it). I will also check out NovaCarHire.It seems the more companies you go through, the more possiblity for multiple billings, and/or cancellations. I just have to hope there won't be a problem.

We rented a car in Sicily from Europcar through AutoEurope, and I just wanted to let you know that the service we received from Europcar was great. We had a mishap where a tour bus crunched into us going up Mt. Etna, and even though I did not have zero-liability CDW (it was 100 euro deductible for collision), they only charged me the 35 euro administrative fee and nothing more. I had some misapprehensions beforehand about Europcar also, but they proved to be unfounded in my case.

I just rented through kemwel.com for Nice.

They use the Autoeurope engine but for some reason, their prices were a lot better than autoeurope.com, especially for automatics.

Sixt gives a discount to Delta Medallion members, promising 25% off. But when you follow the link from Delta, all they have are inflated prices with CDW and no way to rent without.

So I emailed Sixt and they gave me a login and password to get a discount. It was still much higher than what kemwel.com had.

Air France site is also showing 25% off printable coupon for some other rental agency.

All other things being equal I would choose the company with the lowest deductible for the mandatory CDW. If you read the fine print you can find out what the deductible is.

I am renting a car from AutoEurope later this fall and I choose Europcar because their deductible for the CDW was much lower than the other rental companies that offer cars through AutoEurope out of Salerno. If I recall correctly the CDW for EuropeCar was about 150 EU while the deductible from Maggiore was more like 500 EU.

I have always used AutoEurope, but for our last trip we used Car Rental Express, like AutoEurope. Got the car through Auto Europa, saved about $200 over AutoEurope and a $0 deduct CDW.

http://www.carrentalexpress.com

Found their service to be on par with AutoEurope, but prices and insurance were unbeatable. Car was excellent.

dave

autoeurope!

I posted a review, click on my name.They were fantastic! seriously fantastic!
Natalie

You have to refuse CDW when you rent overseas to get coverage on your credit card, which typically covers all of your rental overseas.

Italy may be an exception, I seem to recall.

Can you not get a rental there without CDW?

Does anyone have any experiences, good or bad, with EuropebyCar.com? They seem to have better rates than AutoEurope.

http://www.ebctravel.com/rentalrates.html

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

I've used Avis, AutoEurope, Thrifty (ItalybyCar) and SIXT. They all were just fine. I blew a trans with my Thrifty car (my fault) and they handled the situation very professionally.
I always choose based on cost. While AutoEurope says they will match all prices, I have found that they won't ,if you got an exceptional deal.
Shop them all and shop often. Prices and sales come and go.
I always get $0 deductible. It's not at all unusual to have dents, scratches,etc. appear "out of nowhere".

If you are going to try and decline the CDW and rely on the insurance provided by your credit card be sure that they will cover you in Italy. When I checked on my cards (2 gold and 1 platinum), they all specifically excluded Italy, Ireland and Isreal.

In any case, I don't believe that any rental agency will rent to you in Italy without taking the CDW insurance and since you must decline the CDW in order to use your credit card provided insurance you've got a Catch-22. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has ever successfully used the credit card insurance in Italy and what card provided the coverage?

Go4Fun, you are correct. In order to use your plat CC or AmEx for CDW insurance, you have to decline the coverage on your rental agreement. They are very specific about this.

In Italy, no one will rent you a car unless you took the CDW coverage. That's one reason I flew in/out of Zurich. For a 15 day rental, it saved me 1/2 price, plus the cost of air fare into Zurich was $200 cheaper than going into Milan. It was well worth the 3-hour drive to/from Zurich.

I used AutoEurope (a broker representing several major brands) BUT shopped around and emailed them when I found a lower rate. Each time they more than met the discounts offered by other firms.

Also, check the CDW carefully. Some firms like Hertz have a $0 deductible. Others have as much as a $800 deductible. Also, check for any drop-off fees if not returning it to the same location as well as fees for extra drivers, taxes, etc. An apples to apples comparison is sometimes quite difficult. On occasion, the lower rates I found were not all-inclusive.

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago in France. Kemwell turned out to be quite a bit cheaper than Autoeurope, which I believe is their sister company. We paid about $35 a day for our (standard) 4-door Peugot which I thought was a very good price..the car came from Europcar.

we used SIXT and were very happy with service.