Over the Easter vacation we decided that if we hired a car rather than use some other form of public transport to visit family in another part of the country we could get out and explore the area rather than just sit around chatting the entire time. After all with all the advertising that these big car hire companies have, it should be just a matter of ringing up and reserving the right sized vehicle on the relevant date for the daily amount quoted, right? Well that’s what we thought anyway, but when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, strangely enough it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Actually getting the right size of vehicle for the dates is simple enough if you book far enough in advance, but when it comes to the cost of hiring a car, the quoted daily figure is just a drop in the ocean to what is needed in actual “money in the bank” terms. In order to pick up the keys of our car, which was only a compact family sized vehicle (nothing fancy) we were required to give a credit card imprint that basically put a hold on about £500 of our finances. This we were told was the insurance excess that we would need to pay should anything go wrong with the car. We were only hiring the car for a few days and the insurance was coming out at more than my pet insurance charges for an entire year! We were of course offered a reduced excess rate if we were prepared to pay the insurance premiums to upgrade our cover, but as this was going to cost over £100, plus we’d still have a couple of hundred pounds blocked on our credit card to cover the remaining excess we decided to cut our losses, keep our fingers crossed at hope that the other drivers played nice on the roads! Our luck held and we returned the car in the same pristine condition it was in when we hired it and the hold on our credit card finances was released. We took digital photos to prove there was no damage to the car when we returned it, but these weren’t needed and the hire company released our insurance excess “deposit” within 24 hours.
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Another area that almost caused us a financial problem was in the area of child seats. These are required by law and the car companies are milking this one for what they can. With a daily charge that’s more than the average cheap booster seat costs in the shop, my advice to anyone who needs one is to buy their own and then donate them to a charity shop or other goodwill cause afterwards if you no longer need them.
I feel slightly battered by the entire hire car experience, but definitely a lot more knowledgeable about how it all works than I was a few weeks back. We will hire a car in the future, but next time we’ll be wiser about what the real charges will be, especially with respect to the hundreds of pounds they “fence off” on the credit card until the vehicle is returned.