Posted: Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:15am
To follow on from Jim's findings and using my 20 years of experience hiring cars 3/4 times per year to get to our holiday home in La Florida.
There appears to be 4 levels of service
Picking a car up in the airport arrivals hall will definitely give you the most stressful experience out of them all, recently I picked one up from OK rental, the girl was aggressive, condescending and just thoroughly rude, I didn't accept any of her hard sell but others at either side of me were doing so, Centauro in the arrivals hall were also not nice to deal with and did the damage scam when we returned the car, annual excess insurance sorted that one out.
The next level is the airport operators just off the airport around the Torrellano area and require a shuttle bus to reach them, these appear to try to sell you their fully comprehensive insurance but do not push as hard if you decline.
Please note that if you do decline their insurance both of the above will want to take a hefty deposit from your credit card, dependent upon size of the car €900- €1600.
This next level is my preference, independent operators who meet you at the airport with your car and do not swipe your credit card for a deposit, also their quoted price is what you pay, no sneaky extras. As posted earlier, excellent experience with both Magnum and Lara cars but Lara operate a full to empty fuel policy and may be more useful for longer stays when you have the chance to use the full tank up, the cost of the full tank was fair. There will be other operators that work in this way too ( possibly Coys ?? ) but just giving my opinion of those used.
Finally there are the one man bands who rent out the older vehicles, nothing wrong with that if they are reliable but these usually pick you up and return you to the airport incurring app €100 in transfer costs, ultimately you could be paying in excess of the airport operators for an older car.
Also, currently there is shortage of hire cars, this makes late booking extremely difficult and prices are sky high.
My advice to all would be, secure your car early with a free cancellations operator, you can then flex this around if you see a better deal nearer your departure date, never pay anything upfront, always on the day and always purchase an annual car hire excess insurance policy, they are around £40 in the UK and worth every penny for peace of mind.
Just my opinion, hope it helps, Ken.
A big shout out for Lara cars here, we were returning to the airport on Wednesday and there was a road accident on the N332 which seriously delayed us to such a point that we were in danger of missing our flight to the UK, when this became apparent we called Lara to say that we would be late returning their car, they were very understanding and asked what we would do if we missed the flight, we would have wanted to return to La Florida, they said they would do their very best to help and wouldn't have left us stranded, well done Lara.