2756 'Cross border' Car Hire

Friends are planning to fly out to Italy, pick up a hire car spend a few weeks exploring before heading north to s-west France/Switzerland explore and then return to Italy before handing the hire car back. However, they are having problems finding a hire company that allows you to drive the car out of the country it was hired in. They have considered driving their UK car and using motorail but would prefer the hire car option to reduce the overall amount of driving involved. Has anyone done something similar and found a company that will allow you to drive the car in and out of countries? Thanks for any advice.

Category
Travel & Holiday Advice

I would suggest that you only try the bigger companies like Hertz or Avis as in the past I have not had a problem there might be an extra charge for insurance. I also collected a car in Germany and left it in Prague for this there was a repatriation fee.

[quote=anne2]Friends are planning to fly out to Italy, pick up a hire car spend a few weeks exploring before heading north to s-west France/Switzerland explore and then return to Italy before handing the hire car back. However, they are having problems finding a hire company that allows you to drive the car out of the country it was hired in. They have considered driving their UK car and using motorail but would prefer the hire car option to reduce the overall amount of driving involved. Has anyone done something similar and found a company that will allow you to drive the car in and out of countries? Thanks for any advice.[/quote]

When going to Italy we almost always fly to Nice, hire a car there and then travel in to Italy. We've never had a problem about taking the car across the border. We normally use Budget.

Many thanks for all your replies, I will pass them on. Not sure which companies our friends have contacted, but so far all have said a definite no to taking the car out of its country of hire! They were surprised by this attitude of the car hire companies as, like us, they had thought it would have been a fairly common sort of thing to do.

I have been looking into this also
Avis can do it it but not Hertz but better than Avis might be this-
[url]www.e-sixt.co.uk[/url]
which I picked up from an earlier thread
Wd be interested to know yuor conclusion

There appears to be no issue when hiring from Nice airport. We have used both europcar and Avis. Both have known our address in italy and italian tel.no.

Again thanks for the replies, I'll pass on the website details to them.
I suspect part ot the problem is that they will not have a fixed address in each country as intend to travel on every few days, although they could use ours in Italy they would not have one for France/Switzerland etc.

Robert, I will let you know how they get on.