hearna

Hey guys, any way to avoid the huge one way fees across europe? I am looking at renting from bcn to fco next spring/summer and even using points a 1 week rental on a compact is coming in as 900$, free week is only taking off 150 or so.

AutoSlash

Next spring as in a year from now? Rates will change hundreds of times between now and then. Your best bet is to just book the best rate you can find and use the link below to track the rate. I can't guarantee that there will not be a drop fee, but at least by starting to track the rate this far out, you'll have long time horizon for us to look for better rates.

Note that many booking sites (including ours) can only search a maximum of 330 days out, so if your return rate is farther out than that, you'll have to wait until you reach the 330 day mark to request a quote and/or enter an existing booking for tracking.

Dave Noble

Looking at small cars ( group C) for a 1 week rental I am seeing 172.73 EUR plus tax => EUR209 from BCN ( with no CDP )

The drop fee is unsurprisingly high at EUR968 inc taxes

using points will remove the base cost but will not remove one way fees

The only way to reduce the cost would be if there is a valid CDP that you can use that has no one way rental fee. I would be surprised if you found one for that

rcspeirs

A cross border rental will incur really painful one way fees. The rental company has to get the car back to the original country - having the car re registered in the destination country is a surprisingly difficult and bureaucratic process - even within member states of the EU.
I would rethink the itinerary. If you really need a car, plan on dropping the car in same country in a town near the border and crossing by train to the next country and pick up a different car.

Firstboss

@rcspeirs is correct - the rental companies in Europe aren't allowed to rent the cars registered abroad to local residents. this is because every country has very different taxes on buying and owning a car. (Consequently, the best cars can be rented in Germany for the money, the worst ones - in Denmark and Iceland).
So, the have to either wait for another foreigner to take it as a one-way back or ship the car back on a truck.

To avoid these huge fees, you have to return in the same country. One-way within a country even as big as Germany or Italy will be something like 20 euro extra fee. So, you have to be creative with your itinerary combining cars and trains or bringing the car all the way back

Some nearby countries have much lower cross border one-way fees, like The Netherlands and Belgium - 60 euros extra