We want to rent a car In Rouen after visiting the city for a couple of days. After using it for the Normandy area and the Loire Valley, we want to drop it off at St Pierre des Corps and take the TGV back to Paris. The problems we are encountering are: the Europcar website is only showing manual transmissions ( we could manage if we had to), and also the Europcar website does not show St Pierre as a return site. When I go directly to the Hertz website, it does show St. Pierre as a return. All very expensive, especially when adding all the insurance. Is this necessary? And does anyone know why Europcar doesn't show St Pierre as a return site? Does anyone think the rental rates will go down closer to October? And what do most people do RE: insurance?
Posted by
Moncton NB
1054 posts
Sometimes the website won't show a location as a return site if that site is closed on the date and time you entered for your return. Check the location's hours.
If Tours doesn't work for you, there would be several nearby options (Angers, Le Mans, Blois, Orleans, Chartres).
Posted by
OP
64 posts
Thank you. Angers is much more reasonably priced and an option that should work for us.
Posted by
11 posts
Our experience with rental car insurance in France from earlier this summer:
We obtained the Chase Sapphire Preferred VISA Signature card as the basis to decline the agency’s CDW insurance option. Our BECU VISA card previously provided that perk but this was removed as a benefit some years ago. We made the rental car reservation through the France Hertz website for pickup in Rouen.
At the pickup, we told the Hertz agent that we wished to decline the CDW. The agent (really nice guy, helpful and understood and spoke English quite well) told us that because we made the reservation directly through the French site the CDW was integrally part of the contract and could not be itemized out. He said that to waive it would require us to cancel the reservation (incurring a $65 cancellation fee) and make a new reservation there. We really had no way to verify this was actually the case, so decided to just keep the existing reservation, which included the provided insurance at the cost we were already expecting to pay. Getting the Chase account and card finally didn’t help us but didn’t hurt either.
On a related note, there is less information out there about how liability insurance works for rental cars in France – a bigger cost risk than the collision/comprehensive. We read various things about this, including (e.g. from autoeurope.com) that all rental cars in France are required by law to carry liability insurance. We asked the Hertz agent about this, hoping to confirm we were covered. However, his reaction was like he had no idea what we were talking about and suggested this might be covered by our credit card (personal liability is, in fact, not covered by the Chase card). During the trip we found the “International Motor Insurance Card”, the so-called insurance green card, in the glove box. Further research has convinced us that this is the authoritative reference that there is liability insurance coverage (although we have no info about limits of coverage). It would be nice if this were discussed in more detail here by RS.
Posted by
OP
64 posts
Yes, please, more discussion