I want to rent a car from Prague, explore the countryside and drop off the car in Vienna. Does anyone happen to know of a car rental company/agent that does not charge one-way drop-off fee (or one that charges less than 100 Euros) from the Czech Republic to Austria?

My alternative is to drive back up to Brno and then training down to Vienna and I don't want to waste time doing that if possible.


Thank you!!

I'll be very surprised if you can find it.

Best wishes,

Rex

Your desire would present the rental company with only two choices:
1)pay someone to drive the car back to Prague, then take a train back, probably costing 100€ in trainfare and one day's wages for the driver, or
2)hope that someday, with luck, someone will show up who wants to rent a car in Vienna and drop it off in Prague...what's the chance of that occurring, and within a week after you return it?
From a business perspective, the firm is better off with option one, and charging you the cost, rather than allocating it to all its other customers.

There is no dropoff charge if the car is dropped off in Brno. So the car rental company must have some means to cope with one-way rentals. Brno to Prague is further than Vienna to Brno.

I know it's conceivable because I have done something like this before with only a small dropoff fee (less than 100 Euros), just not between these two countries (Germany to Italy).

Drop off in Brno should likely not require return of the car to Prague. Within the borders of any given country, affiliates of one car rental company share cars from various locations all the time, the same as is true of cars from various states within the United States.

But having a "foreign" car (titled and registered in a different country) is quite a different matter. The Austrian affiliates of any car rental company don't want the added paperwork of having a Czech-registered car in their rental fleet, and will want to see it sent back, and vice versa.

How the rules have changed! and I am not questioning what is being said. In 1975, the cheapest rental I could find was out of Munich, returning the car in Vienna after driving through Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and because it was a cross-border drop off, I avoided the VAT. The car had Danish plates.