We have an 8:00a.m. flight out of Nice airport to London on a Friday. We are U.S. citizens. We will be staying at St. Paul de Vence the night before. We will have a car to turn in. What time should we leave the hotel that morning. Is 5:30 am okay?

At that hour of the day the trip from St-Paul shouldn't take more than half an hour. Do you know that the car-rental agency is open at 6 a.m.? If so, you ought to be able to turn the car in quickly and take the shuttle to the airport; you won't be able to check in for the flight until one hour prior to departure. So I think you could get away with leaving St-Paul around 6:00 a.m.

At least for companies with whom Auto Europe does business, 07:00 is the opening time at the Nice airport. However, it is likely that you can arrange for an after-hours drop off.

My husband says he was told the rental car agency is open 24 hours. Can this be true? That is what I was basing my question on.

I don't know of any car rental agencies in France that are open 24 hours a day. I think we need to get in touch with your agency and ask before going any further.

One thing you could do is stay near the Nice hotel the night before you leave and check your car in during the evening, then take a hotel shuttle to the airport the next morning.

Sorry--I meant to say that YOU need to get in touch with the rental agency.

Note that some French agencies routinely close for at least an hour at lunch time.

We recently had a flight that left the Nice airport at 7:35am. Since we were ultimately flying home that day (via Frankfurt), we didn't want to miss a flight due to something unknown or stupid, so we arrived at the airport a little before 6:00am. The rental car return was not yet open, but we were able to do dropoff service. We had to take a shuttle from one terminal to another to catch our flight (I think one terminal is all Air France?). They ran a shorter amount of time between shuttles after 6:00am. We ended up being one of the first people at the gate, but we didn't want to take the risk of being hosed and missing a flight.

If you have any time that you will be driving by that area, I would recommend a dry run... it gave us the confidence in knowing what we were doing and realizing that we had dropoff at one terminal and flight out of the other. We could have always dropped one person at the terminal while the other dropped the car off, but given our uncertainty around the situation, we chose to stick together instead.

Surfmom and Underhill: Thanks for your help, you have very good ideas. Just what we needed!

If you do drop the car off outside regular hours, be sure and take photos so you can prove the car was returned undamaged, should that become necessary. During regular hours we always insist on a receipt showing that there were no problems with the car.

I found driving around Nice itself pretty annoying, traffic-wise, and the directional signs on leaving the airport not terribly clear. In your case, though, heading in early in the morning should avoid the traffic, and the signs were pretty good from the autoroute (I think there is like a 1.40e toll along there, save some coins). Do be aware that you won't always find nicely paired onramps in each direction for the autoroute, so keep an eye out for that when getting on.