Jeff_Johnson

My girlfriend and I are traveling from Budapest Hungary to Warsaw, but we want to rent a car and go through Vienna and Prague on the way (6 day total trip). Renting a car is about 200 US dollars for those two days, but to drop the car off in another country is another 500 EURO!?!? Is this normal? What are recommendations that I can do to lower the price!

thanks for any help!

thursdaysd

That is standard practice. My recommendation would be to take the train - see seat61.com for info on train travel in Europe.

You seem to have too little time for four cities in any case.

Note that you will get more replies if you post on the Europe board.

janisj

Yes, re-post over on the Europe Forum. There are threads just about daily about car rentals (and many asking "can that huge one way fee be real??" - yes it is )

Trains usually make much more sense - especially since you mention cities where cars are essentially useless.

HappyTrvlr

Either use a train or drop car off in first country and take a taxi across the border to pick up another car in second country. cheaper than the drop fee. We did this going from Portugal to Spain. Our hotel in Portugal found a driver for us and we negotiated a price.

doug_stallings

With so little time, I'm not understanding why you wouldn't take a train.

But you might also try to price the rental through a consolidator like Auto Europe, which can sometimes help overcome the one-way drop-off fees. But this sounds pretty standard to me.

hetismij2

As others have said it is normal. We pay $500 one way fee in the U.S. and that is within the same country, so €500 cross country drop off sounds fair enough to me. The car will almost certainly have to be transported back to the original country, rather than being hired by someone doing the return trip.

Jeff_Johnson

Sounds good! thanks everyone

Now, I know the trip isn't very long but driving through Europe is an experience I want to try (i've done the train thing in the past)