Recommended Auto Rental Companies For Country to Country Travel in Europe

Beware, the drop off fee for dropping a car in a different country than you picked it up from can be substantial.

"Re-patriating" a car is the same process for any car rental company.

Expect an add-on fee of $600-$1100

Use a site like AutoEurope. It will show you the various options for your pickup/drop off locations. The big companies are Sixt, Europcar, and various companies that are more popular in the US: Hertz, Thrifty, etc.

How many weeks? If more than three, check into leasing.

I recommend AutoEurope as well. I’ve been using them for decades, and I’ve never had any problems. They act as a broker for car rental agencies in a variety of countries, and will show you the prices and all the features that you can get in one place.

And yes, there may be a substantial fee for taking the car into a different country, but it really depends on where you’re going. So I would definitely check first and compare prices.

You'd do better to drop it in the country you picked the car up in. And take a train to the next city/country.

Rental companies have to pay substantial $ to have vehicles taken back to their home country. Sometimes it's by a private driver and sometimes it's on a transport truck.

If you were going 3 weeks or longer and starting in France, there are a few manufacturers that lease vehicles to you. They can be dropped in other major cities--like Amsterdam and back where you picked them up. It'd save you a little.

Leasing may be a possibility for us as we are planning on traveling for 5-6 weeks.
I will begin researching this option. Are there specific companies I should look into?
Thank you!

You might consider to plan your route accordingly in order to rent and return the car in the same country (Germany would make sense for a western European loop).
E.g. If you rent a car in Cologne/Düsseldorf area you might start your tour driving to Netherlands and Belgium before heading south to France.
Or you start your tour in Paris for a couple of days, take the train to Karlsruhe and rent a car there. Now you could loop south through Strasbourg, Collmar to Switzerland, Cote Azure, northern Italy and back to Germany via Austria.
In any case you would need to inform the car rental company about the countries you intent to drive to.

From synapse's posts, I have determined that they plan to visit Nice, Cinque Terre, a beautiful place in Switzerland and a beautiful place in Germany. I think that it would best at this point to have an itinerary (draft) from synapse so that people on the forum can best advise. It is probably very likely that a train would be the best way to get around for many locations.

We used Budget in the UK very successfully. On our second rental in the Uk we used Europcar and were not totally happy with them.

We had booked a vehicle, which was not available (we know that happens some time), so we were assigned another vehicle "in the same class." The vehicle we were assigned was unacceptable, as it not comparable and didn't meet our needs.

Also, we booked a car with a navigation system, which the replacement car didn't have and they wanted an outrageous price per day for a GPS. Our only option was to pay almost $800 more for an upgrade (it was for four weeks).

You'd do better to drop of the car in the country you rented it in, and take a train to the next country. You could pick up another rental car if you needed.

Many people are spending a few days in large cities where rental cars can be just sitting in a parking garage @ $20 a day.

https://www.autoeurope.com/short-term-car-lease-europe
https://www.peugeoteurope.com.au
https://www.renault-eurodrive.com/en