Car Safety
 

Many of you have advised not leaving anything in a car. However, if you are driving from one town to another and will visit in between, what do you do with your luggage. For example, we are traveling from Sevilla to Nerja. We will stop in the white towns on the way, like Ronda. What are we to do with our luggage? It is almost impossible to secure a car with a trunk rather than a hatchback. Any suggestions?

In planning my travels, I try to avoid the situation you describe -- generally by staying in one location for a number of days and making day trips with luggage safely in the hotel room. When that is not possible, I try to park in a high traffic location and cross my fingers.

I always rent a car that has a covered luggage area/trunk. And I take off any stickers that might indicate the car is a rental and leave a local newspaper and other local-looking debris (like a baguette in France) in an obvious place inside the car.

Agree that you should never rent a hatchback - always make sure you have a covered trunk. And disguise may help but is not always enough - we had our car broken into in the guarded lot of a French chateau (forget which one - we did many in 4 days) even though it did not have any obvious (to us) rental markings. We were not in transit so they didn't get anything but we had waste time switching cars the next day becasue of the broken trunk lock.

I was told that in Germany you can identify many rental cars by their license plate numbers. Apparently most plates for rentals are issued in one city (I think it was Hamburg or Hannover, but my memory might be faulty on which city it was)

Hi Rufus,

Not only in Germany. My friends in Florida tell me that after a rash of robberies of rental cars, they took the stickers off.

Well, the rental agencies got all of their tags in one batch, so the thieves only had to check a few license plates at the airports and look for those series.

It's easier than that in Florida. Each county has the name of their county on the bottom of the license plate. Rentals used to say "lease" on the bottom. But now they have cleverly replaced that word with "Sunshine State" for all rentals, so as not to alert the thiefs. So any thief who hasn't been in a coma for the past five years only has to look for "Sunshine State" and know it is a rental.