With a scheduled appointment looming and only two hours before his flight at Catania Airport, Camuto had accidentally locked his car keys in the trunk. Calls to the Hertz desk went unanswered. (This was, after all, Italy, on a Saturday morning.)
“There was nothing else to do,’’ Camuto said.
Of course, this isn’t the kind of experience most travelers seek, but it happens. And too often, tense moments involve rental cars. In her years covering Lance Armstrong’s record seven consecutive Tour de France victories, Suzanne Halliburton, a sportswriter in Austin, Texas, was a victim of two faulty clutches, two blown tires, and a lost car key — luckily found before Avis sent a tow truck to bring the car from Nantes to Paris.
Just as much as bad luck, poor rental-car planning can slow down a European trip and sour your mood.
“Probably of all the decisions you make planning a trip, from buying airline tickets to finding hotels, you can get in more trouble faster renting a car,’’ said Bob Bestor, who founded Gemüt.com, a travel agency based in Ashland, Ore., that specializes in car rentals in Europe.
You may think it’s easy to go online and rent the car, whether directly from one of the big companies or a price-comparison website. Expedia recently gave me a quote of $331 for a five-day Avis rental in October, picking up a midsize four-door with automatic transmission at the Bordeaux airport. The rate dropped to $283 if I picked it up at a location eight miles from the airport. In both cases, “estimated taxes and fees’’ were included.
But while you often save money on the basic rate paying online in dollars, you still have to make some potentially costlier decisions involving other “extra’’ fees, particularly the company’s insurance for collision and theft. Depending on the country, car, and rental agency, that can combine to cost $13 to $65 a day. Europcar lumps it together and calls it “super’’ loss damage waiver, while others sell the coverages separately, and in most cases, only offer no deductible (or greatly reduced) if you pay for the “super’’ variety.
