Where To Return Our Rental Car?

[artnbarb]

I'm starting to check Auto Europe for car prices, and I'm not sure where we should return the car. We'll be picking it up in Bath, then driving to the Cotswolds for 9 days. We'll return the car on a Tuesday morning, then fly home, most likely our of Heathrow, on Wednesday morning.

For some reason it seems to be more expensive to return to a city other than the pick-up city - which is crazy, since everything is so close in England, especially in the area we're staying. I'm not sure how much more we'd be willing to pay for the convenience of returning the car to a location other than Bath, but we do want our last afternoon and evening to be spent enjoyable! Perhaps there's somewhere we could return the car, then take a quick train into London for our last night? No matter where we return the car, our last night will have to be someplace where we can get to LHR easily the next morning. Thoughts?

 

[Pauline]

Car rental companies change how they charge for things all the time. I remember when there was no extra cost if you dropped off in the same country.

Maybe you should just pickup and dropoff in Bath? You can get the train from Bath to London. Maybe a last night somewhere near the Heathrow Express train?

You can take the train from Bath to Heathrow in two ways. 1. Train to London, underground, Heathrow Express. 2. Train to Reading (does the Bath train pass through Reading?), RailFly bus service to Heathrow.

But compare all the costs. Taxi from car hire to train station, cost of train, etc.

You could also overnight somewhere on the way to the airport, like Henley on Thames or one of those cute Thames Valley towns, and have a short drive to the airport the day you fly. We did this once and it worked well. We have also overnighted near the airport, but a 10 minute taxi away in an interesting village.

 

[artnbarb]

Thanks Pauline. Altho cost is a factor, spending our last afternoon/evening someplace interesting is really more important. Maybe I should google 'last night near heathrow' and see what comes up!

 

[Pauline]

Windsor is close to Heathrow.

 

[artnbarb]

Yes, it is! And yes, apparently the train from Bath goes to Reading, then Slough, then to Windsor. Reading looks big, and since I've never heard of a reason to visit there, I'm guessing it's not exactly what we'd want for our last day. Windsor OTOH - Art's never been there, it's been years since I was there, so assuming we could find decent lodging, that's a definite possibility. Probably better than going back into London for one night.....

AE still doesn't have rates from Europcar.....but when they do I will check out the cost of returning our car to Windsor, or even Reading, instead of Bath.

 

[Pauline]

We spent a few nights in Windsor and stayed in one of the hotels on the main street across from Windsor Castle. We toured the Castle, walked along the River Thames, walked in the big park in front of Windsor Castle. We stayed there on arrival and used a Windsor taxi service to take us from the airport to Windsor.

If you took the train from Bath, you would transfer (probably at Slough) to a small train to Windsor. It arrives in the city center.

I have not been to Reading. But Slough is where the UK version of The Office (the original) was set - Slough and Swindon (which is near the eastern of the Cotswolds).

 

[artnbarb]

Yes, we would have to change in Slough, but the good news is - for now, the rental car price is the same to return to Bath Or to Reading, so that might work...altho the idea of returning the car TO a city is much scarier than driving OUT of the city!

 

[Lindy]

Hello Art & Barb

We are just back from the UK/Ireland portion of our trip. We rented a car in both. All our past experiences with dropping off a car in other than the original p/u city incurs a charge.

Hertz in UK, Ashford in Kent to Holyhead in Wales, with a drop off charge.Easy rental experience. Used the letter from CC company to cover CDW and Super Ins. with NO issues and NO extra charges.

However rental in Ireland (p/u & d/o in Dublin) with Europcar not quite so easy. First off, the agent indicated that our letter from CC Company was not valid with regard to either the regular CDW or the additional Super coverage, because it was over a month old. Fortunately, we had sent a copy when the original booking was made to a senior manager, who responded that all was in order. Next, was the cost of additional insurance to cover potential damage to windscreen & tires(which is not covered by the CC company). Next because the CC company letter was in my name and my CC was used for the reservation I had to be the principal driver. As I was not, an additional 8 euros per day was charged for a secondary driver. We have now doubled the original rental rate. Wait one more fee, if you are going to be driving in N. Ireland. And if that wasn't enough they suggested that we pay a fee to make sure the gas tank was full, due to the fact that there are a lot of one way streets in Dublin and people get lost and use extra gas thus the tank "might not be full". The car we got was perfectly fine, the roads very good, the Europcar car pickup experience was not good.

So, be aware of any of these extra charges should they be levied in England with Europcar. Be sure to have LOTS of pound coins in your pocket for parking meters/lots, as many towns are not geared to free street parking. We found fuel prices generally to be cheaper at Tesco stores.

Get your car with SatNav (our GPS) - it will save you lots of angst. Take care & drive slowly down any narrow lanes you may encounter, and keep an eye out for places where you might need to pull into for oncoming traffic. Or if you need to reverse to avoid arguing with a tractor or perhaps sheep munching at the side of the road. Gives a total new meaning to "the grass is greener on the other side." Watch out for speed cameras.

Do all this and you will be fine. The Brits are courteous drivers. We returned both cars without even a scratch. Be aware also, that it will likely take you longer to get anywhere with reduced speed limits and lots of winding roads. Oh, almost forgot, BBC has a wonderful classical music station - great for soothing nerves.

Hope this helps with you having a good driving experience.

 

[artnbarb]

Thanks for the current info Lindy - and sorry you had a bad experience. I've never taken a letter from my CC company when renting a car - do others do this? If so, what does the letter need to say? I know what CDW is, but what's super insurance?

Did you rent directly thru Hertz and Europcar, or did you book thru AutoEurope?

Regarding GPS - I was hoping the free unit we got last year from AutoEurope would include England, but it does not. AE will send out the unit - but only X days before your rental, so I'm not sure how that will work since we'll be in Italy for a few weeks before we go to England. Lots of questions still to be answered! At least I have plenty of time to gather all the information!

 

[Pauline]

When we lived in the US I bought a Garmin with the UK maps and brought that with us on trips. I have one here now and got the Europe maps (as well as UK) to use on trips.

When we booked from the US through AutoEurope and did not take the insurance coverage, but were covered by our AMEX card, I did not bring any documentation. But things change all the time in car rental world. Why did you need a letter @Lindy ?

I agree, there are always extra charges. We pay for an extra driver. There seems to be a small daily road tax charge frequently. My AutoEurope contract always lists what these charges will be.

They told us about that extra insurance for windows and undercarriage, but I did not buy it from them. This was the time I bought complete insurance from them, via AutoEurope.co.uk, and then they tell me the complete insurance does not cover undercarriage and windows.

 

[Lindy]

OK, I'm going to try and explain this as best I can. From other postings, I believe this is more prevalent in Ireland. Grandad Bill on ST has posted about this issue in some detail. You might want to have a read of those.

Here goes. The basic insurance is CDW, the additional or "super" as has been named covers the deductibles. The third is to cover tires, windscreens, hubcaps etc. So there are 3 areas to potentially be insured.

If your credit card offers car rental insurance, good. From what we understand, the CC companies do not cover the tires, windscreens etc. In certain countries, the rental car companies have not accepted the word of the client that their CC co. will cover the car rental insurance. Ireland being one of those countries. And indeed, we've been told that there are certain countries, where the CC co.s WILL NOT cover insurance period. This is where the letter comes into play. We called our CC co, TD Visa about the potential problem particularly because we were driving in Ireland. They knew exactly what the situation was and emailed us a letter indicating that they in fact did cover the insurance.
We then emailed the letter to Europcar at the time of booking to be sure that we didn't have to pay anything for insurance. The key is to NOT pay any insurance fees as it will negate whatever the CC co looks after, with the exception of the tires, windscreen etc., which is not all that much but nonetheless annoying.

As we were doing this process in Ireland, we did the same for the UK. Hertz had no issues and accepted the letter as gospel. In fact in our recollection they didn't even bring up the tires/windscreen scenario.

The unfamiliarity of narrow roads and driving on the "other" side of the road for North Americans appears to be the problem. The Europcar people in Dublin indicated that 1 in 5 cars come back damaged. Another interesting fact is that insurance is higher if one goes into N Ireland, hence another charge.

For those travelling in Ireland, we can attest to very good roads.

Hope this makes sense, it is a tricky to understand, and the car rental companies don't necessarily help .

We booked directly with Europcar and Hertz. We've also rented cars in other countries in Europe and have never come across this issue.

 

[artnbarb]

thanks! I've never taken a letter from our CC company when we've rented in Italy - I was always afraid that there would be too many hoops to jump thru and that in the end I'd end up losing.

Altho we've never had any problems in Italy, England might be a bit more challenging, but at least we won't have the language barrier to face!