There is always so much choice when it comes to renting a car on holidays. Many people prefer to organise this with the established rental car companies before they leave home. We have often used Driveaway Holidays in Sydney to book our European car rentals and there is no doubt they offer a large range of cars from a wide variety of big name companies. Their prices are not bad and I have found their follow up service to be very good when a billing dispute arose.

However, quite often the locally domiciled (generally family run) rental car companies in your destinations offer just as good a service and more often than not, at extremely attractive rates. The quickest way to find these is to use online rental car aggregators – an example being  www.cartrawler.com

Best bang for your buck

One we’ve found to be really good is www.arguscarhire.com and have used them for 2 separate hires in Portugal alone. A new Opel Corsa 1.2 petrol (Holden Barina in Australia and Vauxhall Corsa in the UK) was 19 Euro’s a day (inc insurance and unlimited kms). An excess applies of course but friendly, efficient local business’s and great service each time AND both cars available at airport (with many of the cheaper companies, you have to travel ‘off-site’ to collect & drop your vehicle which is a pain!) .

Admittedly a car like this wouldn’t ‘pull the skin off a custard’…but they are sooo economical with fuel being so much more expensive than Aus. And at 19Euros/day, what’s there to complain about?!  Avoid the Fiat Punto if you can….the worst car I have ever driven!! ‘Top Gear’ gives it 2 stars…in my opinion, its worthy of none!

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