We’ve been travelling full time since 2010, and over those years we’ve rented cars from most of the major chains, including Hertz, Sixt, Avis, Budget and Enterprise. We’ve booked through brokers like Discover Cars and AutoEurope, and we’ve gone direct with small local operators in destinations including Morocco, Barbados, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
Along the way we’ve also picked up the sort of experience you don’t ask for: flat tires, engine warning lights, and a cracked windshield, each one a small lesson in what a booking channel is actually worth when something goes wrong.
We are, I’ll admit, fairly mercenary about booking cars. These days we lean towards Discover Cars, because we’ve found them to be good value with a wide selection, but we’ll happily book direct with a rental company, or with a tiny local firm, if that works out better for the trip. In our experience there’s no one-size-fits-all recommendation, and the right answer changes from trip to trip.
Where you should book depends on where you’re going, how you’re paying, and who you want on the other end of the phone if the car breaks down.
Table of Contents:
The Short Answer: Where We’d Book
If you just want the quick recommendation, here it is. Discover Cars is our current default for most international trips, and before we confirm any booking we always run the same price check direct with the rental company’s own site. That ten-minute comparison is the single best habit in car rental.
Here’s how we’d route the common scenarios:
| Your trip | Where we’d start | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A standard rental in Europe, the US or most major destinations | Discover Cars, then check the supplier direct | Wide selection including local firms, clear pricing, and our experience with them has been good |
| A complex multi-country trip, or you want a human involved | AutoEurope | Reservation agents seven days a week and a support hotline during the rental |
| A one-way rental starting in a city neighbourhood, away from the airport | The suppliers direct, quotes from two or three (start with Enterprise for non-airport pickups) | One-way fees vary hugely by route and don’t show up well on comparison sites |
| A US trip where you can wait for prices to move | AutoSlash | It tracks your booking and alerts you when the rate drops |
| A small island or somewhere the big platforms barely cover | A vetted local operator, direct | The firm that will look after you often isn’t listed anywhere else |
The Five Ways to Book a Rental Car (and Why It Matters)
Every car rental website falls into one of five types. The type you pick decides four things that only matter when something breaks: who your contract at the counter is with, which insurance product you’re actually holding, where a complaint goes, and whose phone number gets a truck to you on a hard shoulder.
Discover Cars, to their credit, spell it out in their own terms and conditions: the company “does not operate a car vehicle fleet and does not provide car rental services itself but arranges that these services are provided by the car rental company”. That’s what a broker is, and it helps to know before you buy one’s insurance product.
| Channel type | Examples | Your counter contract is with | The cover you’re offered | Complaints go to | Breakdown call goes to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broker | Discover Cars, AutoEurope, Rentalcars.com | The rental company | The broker’s excess product (reimbursement based) | The broker’s claims team | The rental company |
| Metasearch | Kayak, AutoSlash | Whoever you click through to | Whatever that site sells | The site you ended up booking on | The rental company |
| Online travel agency | Expedia, Priceline | The rental company | The OTA’s add-on policy, if you take it | The OTA’s support queue | The rental company |
| Supplier direct | Hertz, Sixt, Enterprise | The rental company | The company’s own waivers | The company itself | The rental company |
| Peer-to-peer | Turo | The platform and the car’s owner | The platform’s protection plans | The platform | The platform’s assistance line |
Notice the pattern in that last column. Whoever you book through, the breakdown call almost always goes to the rental company itself. The booking site takes your money and may insure your excess, but the supplier holds the car, the keys and the recovery contract. We’ll come back to why that matters in the breakdown section, because it’s the part we’ve tested personally, if not entirely voluntarily.
One more thing the table can’t show: with a broker, you’re holding two relationships at once. The price, the cover and any refund claim live with the broker, while the car, the fuel policy and the counter deposit live with the supplier. Most of the time you’ll never notice the seam. You notice it the day you need both of them at once.
The Best Car Rental Sites by Booking Channel
These are the platforms we’d use ourselves, grouped by what they are instead of ranked in one long list. Each one comes with the downside as well, because a pick with no stated downside is an advert.
1. Discover Cars: Our Current Default
Best for: most international rentals, and for surfacing good local firms alongside the chains.
We’ve booked with Discover Cars repeatedly over the last few years and they’ve become our starting point. The selection is wide, and it includes small local operators as well as the big brands. The pricing breakdown is clear about what’s included before you commit, and their Full Coverage product is cheap compared to anything sold at a counter.
The downside is the broker structure itself. Their Full Coverage is reimbursement based, so if the supplier charges you for damage, you pay first and claim it back with the invoice and proof of payment. That’s normal for the channel, of course, but it means you need the paperwork, and you need the patience for a claims process instead of a wave of the hand at the desk.
2. AutoEurope: Best for Complicated Trips
Despite the name, AutoEurope is worldwide, with around 28,000 pickup locations across seven regions at the time of writing, and it’s the other broker we’ve booked with and would book with again. Where they stand out is human support. Their reservation agents are available seven days a week, and they run a support hotline for problems during a rental, which is the kind of backup that matters on multi-country itineraries, odd pickup times and long rentals that confuse the self-service platforms.
Two cautions. Coverage outside Europe and North America is a bit thinner than the word “worldwide” suggests, so check your destination early. And read their insurance options carefully, because they sell two structurally different products. One is their own refundable excess cover, the other is a zero-excess package offered at the counter by the local rental company, and the exclusions are very different.
3. Rentalcars.com: The Biggest Inventory
Rentalcars.com is part of the same group as Booking.com, and it shows: enormous inventory, slick interface, and coverage nearly everywhere. We cover Booking.com itself, and the sites we’d pick over it, in our rundown of the hotel booking platforms we actually trust. If a car exists in a destination, it’s probably listed here.
The same parent, Booking Holdings, also owns Priceline and Kayak, so three of the names on this page are storefronts of one company. That doesn’t make any of them worse, but it does mean checking all three isn’t the independent cross-check it looks like. We include them for completeness more than preference, because for our bookings Discover Cars has tended to come out better on price and on how clearly the terms are presented before checkout.
As with any broker, remember: the counter contract is with the supplier, and disputes route back through Rentalcars’ support. Factor that in before assuming the famous name means the desk will sort everything.
4. Kayak: Best Metasearch
Kayak is a search engine, not a booking site. It hands you off to whoever has the deal, which is useful for a fast read of the market, and we use it that way, as a price radar. Just be aware of the handoff: the site you land on sets the terms, the cover and the support, so a great headline price on Kayak can lead to a booking with an outfit you’ve never heard of. Check who you’re buying from before you pay.
5. AutoSlash: Best for Tracking Prices
AutoSlash does one clever thing: you give it a booking, and it watches the price, hunting for coupons and emailing you when the rate drops. The rebooking is yours to do, though, and so is cancelling the original, which is pretty important on a prepaid rate where you could otherwise end up paying for two cars.
Car rental prices move constantly, so on a US trip booked months ahead this can save you real money for a few minutes’ work. It’s heavily US-focused, and the coupon-and-membership logic works best with American suppliers, which makes it more useful than it looks if you’re renting at home, and less so on a trip to Europe.
We’d also add, you can do this yourself without using AutoSlash. Nearly every car rental booking offers free cancellation, and we’ve saved a fair penny by checking if a cheaper rate is available closer to the time and then simply rebooking. AutoSlash makes it more convenient, but it’s not like this is a state secret.
6. Priceline: Best for US Bundles
Priceline is a classic online travel agency: cars, flights and hotels under one roof, with the occasional opaque deal where the price is good and the supplier is revealed after you book. For a US trip where you’re bundling anyway, it deserves a look. For international rentals we find the broker route gives clearer terms, and clarity is worth a few dollars in this category.
7. Expedia: Best If You’re Already Booking Everything Else There
Expedia follows the same logic as Priceline: the car is an add-on to a trip you’re assembling anyway, and package rates can be decent. The car rental terms are the supplier’s, with Expedia’s support queue in between. If you’re not bundling, there’s no particular reason to book a car here over a specialist.
8. Turo: A Different Animal Entirely
Turo is peer-to-peer, so you’re renting a specific car from a specific person, with the platform’s protection plans in place of a rental company’s waivers. The upside is character and sometimes price: interesting cars, no counter queue, and a car handed over where you want it. It works at airports as well as in town, but airport pickups add delivery and parking fees, so check the total and not the headline day rate.
The downside is that almost everything in this article about counters, contracts and roadside numbers works differently, and a stranger’s car comes with a stranger’s quirks. Read the protection plan tiers carefully before assuming it works like a normal rental, because it doesn’t.
A note on the ones we’ve left out. If you hold a Costco or AAA membership, both run their own rental channels, and in the US they’re worth adding to your price check alongside the sites above. We’ve not written them up in detail because we don’t hold either membership and haven’t booked through them. Better to point you at them than to pretend to experience we don’t have.
The Rental Companies Themselves: Who You Actually Get
Whichever site you book on, a rental company ends up handing you the keys, and they’re not interchangeable. We’re not going to rank them globally, because the best company changes by country. For specific destinations we’ve covered this in depth in our guides to driving in the UK, driving in the USA and driving in Iceland.
A few observations from our own rentals. What first got us using Enterprise, years ago, was practical. On the one-way routes we were doing at the time they had cheaper drop-off fees, and they kept turning up in useful places.
That second part is still their model today. Enterprise built its network around home-city branches rather than airport counters, so they’re often the option in an ordinary neighbourhood where the other majors only serve the airport and the station. If you need to collect a car somewhere that isn’t a transport hub, check them first.
Hertz, Sixt, Avis, Budget, Europcar, Alamo, National, Dollar and Thrifty all sit in the same tier of big international suppliers, and our experience across them has been broadly fine, apart from the mechanical dramas below. After this many years I couldn’t tell you which brand deserves which incident.
The differences that matter are local: which one has the depot near you, what their counter terms say about cards and deposits, and what they charge for the extras. That’s a per-trip check, not a loyalty decision.
When to Skip the Comparison Sites and Book a Local Operator
On small islands and in smaller markets, the best rental firm is often one the big platforms barely list. We’ve done this in a few places, and it’s taught us both how well it can work and how careful you need to be about verifying who you’re dealing with.
In Barbados we rented from Stoutes Car Rental, a long-established local firm, and the experience was a world away from an airport mega-desk: a local business renting you a car suited to local roads. Interestingly, Stoutes is also bookable through Discover Cars, where they hold a 9/10 rating at Bridgetown Airport, so local versus aggregator isn’t always an either-or choice. Sometimes the aggregator is just another door to the same good local firm, with a broker’s cover attached.
In Mauritius we rented a car from AKD, a local car and scooter rental firm operating since 2009 with a counter at the airport and a branch in the north of the island, and we had no problems at all.
The trade-off with any local independent is, of course, structural, and no reflection on any one firm: there’s no broker claims team between you and the operator, so the deposit terms, the fuel policy and the damage process are whatever you agreed at the counter. Read them before you sign, not after.
The vetting matters, though, and here’s the method we’d use now. First, check the national tourism board’s listing before trusting the top search result: Barbados’s official tourism site, for example, lists Stoutes with a link to their real website. That check exists because lookalike booking sites do rank alongside real operators.
While researching this article we found a site trading on the Stoutes name that carried no phone number, no address, a third-party booking widget and another company’s copyright line. A page like that is a reseller wearing the operator’s name, and the terms you’d book on are not the firm’s own.
Second, treat silence as an answer. One small operator we used in the Seychelles years ago now exists only as a directory entry, last updated in 2022, with no website, no email and a PO box for an address. When we checked in July 2026, we couldn’t confirm they still trade at all, so they’re not in this article. If you can’t find a working phone number, current reviews and a live web presence, book somewhere you can.
What Happens When the Car Breaks Down
This is the section we’re most qualified to write, unfortunately. Across years of rentals we’ve had flat tires, an engine warning light mid-trip, and a cracked windshield, all on cars from the major chains. None of them really ruined a trip, but each one taught us the same thing: the moment a car fails, the question of where you booked stops being about price.
The distinction we had to learn on the roadside is between money and dispatch. A broker’s insurance product deals in money, and only money. Discover Cars’ Full Coverage, for example, explicitly covers towing expenses and roadside assistance costs, along with tires, wheels, locks, lost keys and even misfuelling. That’s useful cover to have. But nobody at a broker can dispatch a recovery vehicle, because brokers don’t operate any. What they operate is a claims process.
The number that gets a truck to you belongs to the rental company, and it’s printed on the rental agreement you signed at the counter. Which means the document you most need in a breakdown is the one you were paying least attention to when they handed you the keys.
Photograph it before you drive off, along with the panels. When a warning light has come on for us, the useful number has been the supplier’s assistance line, and the useful document has been that agreement.
So before you leave the counter, three quick checks: confirm the breakdown number on the agreement, ask what the process is for a replacement car if this one fails, and if you’ve bought broker cover, check whether it includes recovery costs, because brokers differ. Discover Cars names towing and roadside costs as covered; AutoEurope’s zero-excess package excludes tires and glass outright. Ten minutes of reading, done in the car park before you pull away.
We keep a small kit in the car for exactly these moments, and our road trip essentials guide covers what’s in it.
Excess Cover: The Arithmetic Worth Doing
Excess cover is the single biggest variable cost in car rental, and the place where the counter makes its money. The excess on a rental car, the amount you’re liable for before insurance takes over, typically runs from £200 to £2,000 and can reach £3,000 according to Which?’s car rental insurance research. The desk will offer to reduce it to zero for a daily fee, and that fee is where the arithmetic gets interesting.
Which? found supplier-sold excess cover costs on average eight times the equivalent third-party policy. Their worked example is a week’s rental in Spain: £12.24 for their top-rated standalone policy against £287 for the supplier’s own cover at the desk. That’s the kind of sum really worth doing before the desk does it for you, with a queue behind you and the keys held just out of reach.
You have three realistic options. The cheapest is usually a standalone excess policy, bought annually or per trip from a specialist insurer, and the Which? figures above show the margin. You pay the supplier if there’s damage, then claim it back.
In the middle sits the broker’s own cover, like Discover Cars’ Full Coverage, added at booking. It costs more than a standalone policy and far less than the counter, and it’s also reimbursement based, so you’ll need the supplier’s invoice and proof you paid it to claim.
The most expensive is the counter waiver from the rental company itself, which removes the excess outright rather than refunding it, so there’s no claim to make afterwards. Convenient, but watch the exclusions. The zero-excess packages sold at counters through AutoEurope, for instance, exclude wheels, glass, tires, roof and undercarriage, which is quite a list given those are precisely the bits of a rental car that get damaged.
“Full coverage” sounds like nothing will be charged to you, and that isn’t how it works. With a broker or standalone policy, the supplier will still charge your card for the damage, and you then claim it back with documentation. It works, but you need the documents, a card that can absorb the charge in the meantime, and a bit of patience.
Renting in the US works differently from the European model above, and the difference is why so many Americans get caught out in Europe. A US rental comes with the state’s minimum liability cover attached, because the rental company has to provide it. The Insurance Information Institute’s caveat on that is the useful half: “often this does not provide enough protection”. Damage to the car itself is the part that isn’t included, and that’s what the counter is selling when it offers you a collision damage waiver.
Nobody publishes a standing daily price for that waiver, incidentally. We looked. It’s quoted at booking or at the desk and it moves with the pickup location, the car class and the length of the rental, so the only figure that means anything is the one on your own quote.
Then there’s the card. If your plan is “my credit card covers it”, read the name of the benefit, because the name is the answer: Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver. Collision. Visa’s own wording sets out the limit, and it’s worth quoting in full: the benefit “reimburses you for damages caused by theft or collision”, and then, “Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver covers no other type of loss. For example, in the event of a collision involving your rented vehicle, damage to any other driver’s car or the injury of anyone or anything is not covered.”
So the card handles the car you’re driving. It doesn’t handle the other car, or the person in it. That part is liability, and how much of it you already hold depends entirely on where you’re renting. Terms also vary by card tier and by issuer, so check your specific card rather than assuming the network’s standard benefit applies to it.
That benefit is eroding, too. As of mid-2026 Citi has dropped it and Capital One has trimmed it to certain cards, so check your card’s current terms before the trip, not at the counter. And if you are relying on the card, you nearly always need to explicitly refuse the cover offered at the desk for the benefit to apply at all, while some rental firms will want proof of insurance before they’ll let you decline. Your card issuer can usually provide a letter, so ask for it before you travel.
In the EU, liability is mostly a solved problem. Third-party cover is compulsory under EU law, and because the obligation attaches to the vehicle rather than to the driver, any road-legal rental already carries it and the rate includes it. Hertz UK says as much in its own terms: third-party liability comes with every rental as standard, because the law requires it. The EU floor has been €6.45 million per accident for injury and €1.3 million for property damage since December 2023, and countries can set more, as Austria does at €1.34 million for property damage.
Set that against California, which requires $15,000 of property damage cover and sits among the more generous US states, and you can see which side of the Atlantic the real exposure is on.
We rented through Sixt in Austria and declined the collision products at the counter, because our Chase card covers that side of it. The third-party liability was simply there in the price, as Austrian law requires. That’s the shape of the decision in Europe. Think hard about the damage waiver, and leave liability alone.
The US is where a top-up is worth pricing, because there the state minimum is the whole of your cover, and $15,000 of property damage doesn’t go far into the back of a new pickup. That’s what the Insurance Information Institute means by “often this does not provide enough protection”. Avis, for one, sells the top-up as Additional Liability Insurance, covering third-party injury and property damage up to $500,000. European suppliers mostly don’t offer an equivalent, and Hertz UK’s optional extras all reduce your own exposure instead of raising the third-party limit, though a few brokers do sell a liability top-up aimed at American drivers.
Coming the other way, a British reader renting in Europe starts from the opposite position. Basic damage cover is normally already in the price, subject to that excess, which is why UK credit cards very rarely offer rental car cover as a perk.
The Counter Checklist: What Gets You Refused or Overcharged
Most car rental disasters don’t happen on the road, they happen at the desk, and nearly all of them are avoidable at booking time. Here’s what we check, in rough order of how badly it can go wrong.
Manual or Automatic
The single commonest international booking mistake, and the one with no remedy at the counter. In Europe, manual transmissions are the default and automatics are a smaller, pricier pool, especially outside airports and big cities. In the US it’s the reverse. AutoEurope currently puts the premium for an automatic in Europe at up to 50%, and whatever the exact figure, the supply problem is real: the counter can, of course, sell you many upgrades, but a transmission isn’t one of them.
If you can only drive an automatic, book an automatic, book it early, and double-check the confirmation says so. It’s never caught us out, but only because we check the confirmation every time.
Cards and Deposits
The main driver needs a card in their own name, and the desk will pre-authorise a deposit hold on it. Debit cards are sometimes accepted, but with quite a few strings attached.
Hertz in the US, as a worked example from their published rental terms as of July 2026: up to $200 held on a credit card but $500 on a debit card, plus estimated charges, and debit rentals come with extra conditions like advance booking, a minimum age of 25 and two forms of ID.
Every supplier’s rules differ, so check the payment terms for your specific rental, and make sure the card you bring has room for the hold on top of your holiday spending.
And if anyone driving is under 25, expect a young-renter surcharge on top of the rate, charged per day. It varies by supplier, state and car class, and it’s large enough to change which supplier is cheapest, so get it into the quote rather than meeting it at the desk.
Licences and International Driving Permits
I learned to drive in the UK, drove for years in the US on my UK licence, and now hold a US one, so I’ve been on both sides of this particular counter. If you’re driving abroad on a US licence, an International Driving Permit is the document most likely to decide whether the desk hands you the keys.
An IDP translates the licence you already hold into a standard format a foreign police officer or rental desk can read, and it only works when you carry your actual licence alongside it. In the US, only two organisations can issue one, both authorised by the State Department: AAA and the American Automobile Touring Alliance. You will see it written that AAA is the only one. It isn’t, and you don’t have to take my word for either version: usa.gov lists both.
That same page is worth a look for what it says about everyone else selling “international driver’s licences”. The government’s wording is blunt: “Many are fraudulent and may try to scam you out of money or personal information.”
The costs are modest either way. AAA charges $20 for the permit if you walk into a branch with two passport photos of your own, or $20 plus a $10 photo fee plus shipping if you apply online, with around five business days of processing.
AATA is online only, at $20 for the permit, $9 for the photo and $16 upwards for shipping depending on how quickly you want it, so budget around $45 all in. Both are printed and posted, and there’s no digital version, which catches out anyone who leaves it to the week of the flight.
Which countries actually require one varies more than you would expect, and it’s worth checking rather than taking it off a list on a blog, including this one. Here is what the State Department’s own country pages said in July 2026 for the European destinations Americans drive most.
| Country | IDP on a US licence? | What the State Department says |
|---|---|---|
| Spain | Yes | You “must have an International Driving Permit to rent a car”. Police can impound the car and fine you on the spot if you don’t have one. |
| Austria | Yes | A US licence on its own “is not sufficient”. You need an IDP, or an official translation of your licence, which the Austrian motoring clubs can also issue once you are there. |
| Czechia | Yes | Required on top of your licence. Without one you risk an extra fine and “denial of an insurance claim after an accident”. |
| Greece | For the insurance | Greek law asks only for your valid US licence, but insurers “may require that you have both”. |
| Portugal | No | Your US licence is good on its own for up to six months. |
| Italy, France, Germany and Croatia | Nothing listed | No IDP requirement appears on their country pages, which is not the same as a promise nobody will ask you for one. |
Two things that table can’t tell you. The rental company sets its own document rules, and a desk can refuse you on its contract terms even where local law wouldn’t, so check your supplier’s requirements alongside the country’s. And there are three permit conventions in use, so a multi-country trip can need more than one.
Coming the other way, UK photocard holders don’t need an IDP for the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein, per GOV.UK. For the USA, GOV.UK lists the 1949 permit but says to check with the state and the rental company, and in practice it’s the rental company’s requirement that bites at the counter.
Borders and One-Way Fees
Taking a rental car across a border without telling the supplier can void your insurance entirely, which turns a minor bump abroad into an uninsured accident. If you’re planning to cross, declare it at booking, get the authorisation and any required insurance documents in writing, and expect a fee.
Same for one-way rentals: the fees are set per route and per season, they can be modest or eye-watering, and no supplier publishes a neat schedule. Get the quote in writing before you commit, because the invoice is a bad place to find out.
Tolls, If You’re Driving in the US
This one is invisible on every comparison site and it adds up fast. Most US rental companies put a toll transponder in the car and charge a convenience fee for it, on top of the tolls themselves.
Avis and Budget publish their terms, and since they’re the same group the wording is identical: $6.95 for each day on which you incur a toll, capped at $34.95 per rental period. Their unlimited version runs $10.99 to $25.99 per day depending on where you collect, and that one is charged every day of the rental whether you touch a toll road or not. Read that twice before accepting it for a fortnight with one toll bridge in it.
The sting in the standard product is in the small print: tolls are billed at “the maximum prevailing non-discounted or cash rates”, so you lose the electronic-tolling discount as well as paying the fee. Hertz and Enterprise run comparable schemes, at rates that vary by pickup location and get disclosed at booking rather than published as a standing rate, so read what yours actually says.
If your route only crosses a toll or two, declining the transponder and paying online afterwards is usually cheaper. For a week on Florida or Northeast toll roads, the capped version can work out better.
Mandatory Equipment
Several countries legally require specific kit in the car: warning triangles, hi-vis vests, winter tires in season. The rules are country-specific and sometimes conditional. Austria is a good example of why you should check the actual rule: between 1 November and 15 April, winter tires are required whenever there’s snow, slush or ice on the road, per the Austrian motoring organisation ÖAMTC. It’s a weather-dependent rule rather than a blanket seasonal one, with fines from around €100.
A local rental car should of course come correctly equipped, but if you’re picking up in one country and driving into another in winter, confirm the car meets the destination’s rules. That’s the supplier’s job to provide and your job to check.
If your trip includes trickier driving than the booking form asks about, our guides to single-track roads and driving in Iceland cover the road-level side of the same preparation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Car Rental Sites
What is the best website to book a rental car?
There isn’t a single best site for every trip. Discover Cars is our current default because of its selection and value, but we always compare against the rental company’s own price before booking, and for multi-country trips or when we want a person involved we’d use AutoEurope. Beyond that, it’s about matching the booking channel to the trip.
Is it cheaper to book direct with the rental company or through a comparison site?
Sometimes one, sometimes the other, and the difference can be significant in both directions. Brokers get wholesale rates, but suppliers run direct-only deals and sometimes waive fees for direct bookings. Our habit is to find the best broker price, then run the identical car and dates on the supplier’s own site before committing. It takes ten minutes.
Do I need an International Driving Permit to rent a car abroad?
For some destinations yes, for many no. Of the European countries Americans drive most, the State Department lists an IDP requirement for Spain, Austria and Czechia, notes that Greek insurers may want one, and says a US licence alone is fine in Portugal for up to six months. Italy, France, Germany and Croatia list no requirement. Beyond the law, the rental company’s own terms are what get enforced at the counter, so check those too.
On a US licence, only AAA and the American Automobile Touring Alliance can issue one, and usa.gov confirms both. AAA is $20 in branch, and AATA is around $45 all in once the photo and shipping are added. Other websites selling “international driver’s licences” are widely fraudulent, per the same page.
UK photocard licence holders don’t need an IDP for the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein, per GOV.UK.
Can I rent a car with a debit card?
Often yes, but with conditions that vary by supplier, country and car class. Expect a larger deposit hold, possible extra ID requirements, and exclusions on premium vehicles. Hertz in the US, for example, holds $500 on a debit card against $200 on a credit card. If a debit card is your only option, read the payment terms for your exact rental before booking.
Should I buy excess cover at the rental desk?
It’s nearly always the most expensive way to buy the same protection. Which? found counter cover averages eight times the price of a standalone excess policy, with their worked example at £287 versus £12.24 for a week in Spain. Buy a standalone policy or the broker’s cover in advance instead, and remember both are reimbursement based, so you’ll pay the supplier first and claim back with documentation.
Does my credit card cover a rental car?
Usually for damage to the rental car itself, and not for anything else. The benefit is called Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver, and Visa’s own wording says it “covers no other type of loss”, specifically excluding damage to another driver’s car and injury to anyone.
So liability is the other half, and how much you already hold depends on where you’re renting. In the EU it’s compulsory and included in the rate, with a floor of €6.45 million for injury and €1.3 million for property damage. In the US you get the state minimum, which in California is $15,000 of property damage, so a top-up is worth pricing there. Cover also varies by card tier and issuer, and it’s been shrinking: Citi dropped its benefit and Capital One trimmed it to certain cards as of mid-2026. Check your card’s current terms before you travel, and note that you usually have to decline the counter’s own waiver for the card benefit to apply at all.
Who do I call if my rental car breaks down?
The rental company, using the breakdown number printed on the rental agreement you signed at pickup, not the website you booked through. Booking sites and brokers don’t operate recovery vehicles; the supplier does. If you bought broker cover, keep every receipt from the incident, because towing and roadside costs may be reimbursable afterwards depending on the policy.
Can I take a rental car across a border?
Only with the supplier’s advance permission, and crossing without it can void your insurance. Declare your route when booking, get the authorisation and any required documents in writing, and expect a cross-border fee. Rules are tighter in parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, so check early if your route goes that way.
Are rental cars abroad automatic or manual?
In Europe the default is manual, and automatics cost more and sell out earlier, especially away from airports and major cities. In the US and Canada the default is automatic. If you can only drive one kind of transmission, book it explicitly and check the confirmation says so, because the counter won’t be able to fix it on the day.
Wrapping Up Our Guide to the Best Car Rental Sites
Car rental rewards a bit of mercenary thinking. Start with a broker you trust for the price radar, check the supplier direct before you commit, buy your excess cover anywhere but the counter, and photograph the rental agreement before you drive off. And when a trip takes you somewhere small, spend the extra twenty minutes vetting the local firm; some of our best rentals have come from operators no comparison site ranks.
We’ll keep this guide updated as our booking habits change, since they have before and no doubt will again. If you’re planning the driving side of a trip, our guides to driving in the UK, driving in the USA and the world’s best road trips are the natural next reads.
Questions about booking a car for a specific trip, or a channel we haven’t covered? Pop them in the comments below and we’ll do our best to answer!
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