Hi,
We will be in the UK from late April to mid-May next year. We intend to stay 4 nights in London before hiring a rental car at Heathrow for the next 2 weeks to tour the rest of the UK.
I would appreciate any useful advice, tips or suggestions for getting the best deal for hiring a car.
Thank you.
Nice.
Yeh, when I lived over there I discovered it's (anecdotally) the inverse of here - all manuals, few autos.
The reason is if you learn on a manual, you can drive manual and auto. If you learn on an auto, then that's all you can drive. People get used to manual (and until recently they were both cheaper, and more efficient).
As far as rentals are concerned, you might well find that NOT hiring at Heathrow gets you a cheaper price (for obvious reasons). You should also be aware that two weeks = rest of the UK isn't going to do well - particularly if you want to go up north. Depends on where you want to visit, but train can be a viable option (more so than here).
Get it sorted early is usually a good route to a lower price.
Well there you go. In my time there, I never bothered asking the reason. Thanks for that.
Living here at the moment, it's definitely cheaper to rent a car away from the airport. Try Enterprise car rental or autoescape.
Also the car rental companies here I find are less likely to scam you than the ones in Australia. In my experience of course. We had an incident in Melbourne where a magical "scratch" suddently appeared on one wheel trying to scam us into paying a $400 repair.
We hired a car in Scotland earlier this year. After reading all the horror stories on the internet I very nearly decided that we'd walk around Scotland instead. Ended up booking directly with Enterprise as they seemed to have the least amount of horror stories and reasonable prices. They were fantastic, drop off and pick up were stress free, no dodgy sell-ups etc. Their scratch/damage policy was reasonable and we didn't have any dodgy charges from them afterwards. We saved a fortune (50%) by choosing our pick-up point carefully - 10km down the road from the airport was the best one. In town and at the airport were both double the price.
One thing I discovered during my research was to check that your travel insurance policy covers you for any insurance excess (usually about 1000+ pounds) charged by the car hire company if you get into an accident. That way you don't have to take out their extra insurance policy to cover the gap if it's already covered by your other insurance.
Holidayautos.com
Great prices
Worth keeping in mind… when I traveled there last year, auto's were almost 66% more expensive… I wasn't going to pay the extra, and have no issues driving a manual despite preferring an auto given I was going to be driving around foreign cities and country side. When I went to pick the car up the guy at the counter commented, "I have heaps of autos left- can I offer you an auto instead of a manual? Same price."
Not a bad rental experience at all :D