Car Hire and Car Rental in Lisbon

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When is A Great Deal On A Rental Car Not Such A Great Deal?

Let me summarise what happened to me and my partner a couple of years back when we tried to hire a rental car and hopefully prevent you falling into the same trap.

As a last minute idea we thought about hiring a car for our two week stay in Lisbon. We found an amazing offer over the internet as it was slightly off season in April - 10 days “A class” rental car for 70€ provided by one of the major rental companies operating out Lisbon airport. On collection of the rental car we were told that the car included insurance but the excess was £750!

 

Yes £750 pounds and this was from an advert which had stated that insurance was included. I was kindly informed by the sweet women behind the desk that you could purchase further insurance to cover the excess for the other insurance at £14 per day, twice the value of the original hiring charge. In any other country I would have said stick you £14 “we’ll be fine” but I know that at the bottom of the main airport road is the busiest roundabout in Portugal which has faint traffic lights hidden behind trees and virtually no lane markings. If I was going to have a crash it would have been within 5 minutes of picking up the car.

After much musing, which involved considering not even taking the car, we decided to blow a third of our budget on a rental car we had supposedly already paid for. Please heed our warning the price you see at the travel agent or on the internet is not always the price you are going to pay. And after talking to many other travellers in Lisbon the story is even worse for drivers under 25. This age group are forced to pay an additional supplementary fee per day on top of the rental price and extra insurance. This is to cover the risk that the young driver is more likely to crash but more commonly it is Portuguese who are likely to cause an accident. On the refusal to pay the additional charge the rental car is simply refused and the deposit simply lost.

Please consider if you really need a hire a rental car in Lisbon, and remember the Portuguese drivers have the highest traffic death rate in Europe for a reason.

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