REntal Car navigation

We bring a Garmin gps from home to avoid renting one.

My experience with rented GPS units in Europe has not been good. So, we purchased a Garmin. It's now an older model. On each trip I download newer maps. When I get to where I'm going it takes anywhere from 1/2 to 3 hours for the gizmo to figure out where it is in the world. Then, all is well and it has come in very handy.

We have traveled extensively in Italy and have taken our TomTom. It was new on our first trip and was the best investment we made.

We purchased the s with boy local and Europe maps. Practiced for one day at home and used it. It changed how we traveled. No more focusing on maps (we still take maps as a back up and for planning). It allows us to travel to remote area and the travel back to our hotel.

I would buy one at home and the use it in Europe. If you rent one you will need to learn it. While they are easy to use, everyone is slightly different. Enjoy your trip.

You absolutely need a gps for Tuscany unless you are an absolute ace with a map and compass. For the price of the rental you can buy a good unit in the US. Just make sure it has current European maps.

We used our Tom Tom in Italy. I wouldn't travel without it. Keep a map for planning and back up if something happens. But trying to follow a map with different signs in a different language can be difficult and especially in towns with lots of quick turns, one way streets, not always gridded well stress any driver/navigator marital relations.

I haven't used paper maps for navigation for over 10 years. Currently I use my smart phone and even in remote areas of Sardinia and Corsica, Google maps was flawless. If you want to use a GPS unit, and there are many who prefer it to the smart phone, it might be cheaper to purchase one and load Italian maps than renting one from an auto rental agency. And you'll have it for future trips.

Nicole,

You'll also need to ensure that each driver listed on the rental form has the compulsory International Driver's Permit. If you haven't driven in Italy before, it would be a good idea to do some research on ZTL (limited traffic) areas, as hefty fines will follow if you drive through those.

We rented from Hertz and at first opted for their NeverLost system. I found out that it is not fully functional in Europe. I changed my reservation to save the $90 and bought a new Garmin Nuvi, since ours was several years old. The new Garmins are inexpensive and are head and shoulders better than old ones. Since I travel frequently for work, it was well worth the price.

With the Garmin Nuvi, you can buy SD cards with maps of Europe, including one with Italy. Before we left for our trip, I sat down with the Garmin and entered a number of places I knew we would visit, from our agriturismo to parking lots in a number of towns.

This turned out to be a great decision. As soon as we got our car at the Rome airport, I looked in saved places and pulled up our agriturismo just outside of Greve. The Garmin took us right to it using a combination of the Autostrada and scenic roads. It even shows you the speed limit which helped in the few places we didn't see a sign.

We leaned on it heavily the first few days of the trip, but by the end of the week we successfully navigated from Greve to Siena and back without using it. I also like paper maps to get the big picture. The paper map helped on occasion, but most of the time we just used the Garmin.

After reading some of the comments about driving in Italy, I was a little concerned. I did my homework before we left, familiarizing myself with road signs and reading driving tips. If you are a reasonable defensive driver, you won't have any problems. Frankly, I'd rather drive in Italy than in Atlanta.

I hope you have a great time! Tuscany is a magical place full of friendly and helpful people.

Trying to rely on paper maps is a mistake unless you are Magellan

You have 3 options and the 3rd one you might not have thought of but may cost the same and is a million times better:
1.) Rent from the car rental place (for a long rental this is usually the most expensive)
2.) Take one from home either buy it or use one you have and buy a European maps card
3.) Rent a wifi hotspot and use your smart phone (Waze is a free app that works amazingly in Italy)
There is a very small chance your rental car will have dashboard screen GPS but unless renting a higher end car this is unlikely.

Having just returned we did options 2 and 3 to be covered.
I bought a Tom Tom with European Maps preloaded and packed it in our suitcase, put it in the rental car and NEVER once used it. In fact I left it in the car when we returned the car in Venice was not worth packing for the trip home since I don't envision ever using it again.
The reason being #3 was a far superior option and the cost was roughly the same so I highly recommend it.
We rented a wifi hotspot from Expresso Wifi for our stay and then connected our US Iphones with no international plans.
The service is cheap and they ship to your hotel and then you just leave at your hotel when checking out even if in different parts of the country.
Data is unlimited, so we used our Waze app to navigate all around Italy for 2 weeks.
Added bonus the Waze app will audibly notify you of upcoming speed traps (which is certain parts feel like they are every mile)
In comparison the Tom Tom felt like 2001 technology and was far inferior.
For 2016 using your smart phone and wifi hotspot is definitely much better than anything available to you.
There were times in the crete sensei on backroads and other areas where we lost signal but as long as you programmed where you were going the Waze app never loses GPS of where you are and where you are headed so lack of a signal does not matter unless you needed to enter in a change of address.
Put your destinations into the app as you are leaving a town and you will be all good, signal was strong in every town.

The big other bonus is now you have a wifi connected smartphone everywhere you go including outside of the car.
Navigating around by foot in a city like Venice that was a huge benefit to know which roads led to a bridge vs. which were dead ends at a canal but even in Florence it was a major help.

For this simple question, there are a lot of possibilities! If you don't use a GPS at home, don't start in Italy. A GPS won't handle the restricted traffic (ZTL) zones well, and they are best for finding specific addresses. I love maps for the overview they provide, along with info about terrain and nearby features. If you get a map you need 1:200,000; Michelin is ok, but Touring Club Italiano or De Agostino are better and the Tuscan edition is available on Amazon. Another alternative is to download offline Google maps of the areas you're interested in and use those. Free wifi is easily available in Italy in cafes and hotels, and you can inform yourself that way if you need to.

Do you have a Sprint smartphone by any chance? We used ours for FREE with Google Maps. Three weeks of walking, driving and exploring and it never failed us, except for one false lead that took us 5 minutes out of our way. I was surprised that the free 2G data was fast enough to work in the car, but it really was terrific.

The problem with paper maps, even the one we used last trip - the Touring Club Italiano detailed one, is that they list the route numbers, but the roads in actuality, do not. You have to navigate by going town to town, so the route numbers become meaningless. Also, the map is the size of a bedsheet and still not detailed enough to figure out which town is next in line. At least that was my experience.

We looked into buying Italy download for a loaned Garmin, but it was over $100 just for the map, and they don't have the best reputation for accuracy. Google maps even even gave us accurate traffic info going into Rome or any small town.

"We looked into buying Italy download for a loaned Garmin, but it was over $100 just for the map, and they don't have the best reputation for accuracy."

Joan,
We bought the SD card for our Garmin. It was $42.00.

Our experience was that the maps were highly accurate, even on small streets in little villages.

We also are doing the same thing. We hope to go in April/May next year and rent a car.

I have the App Waze. My question to others is do I have to buy data for my IPhone to use it? I'm confused. Some posters have said that some Apps once downloaded don't use internet connection. Does Waze?

I choose to turn my data completely off and rent a wifi hotspot, which you then connect to easily from your Iphone.
We had 2 Iphones and an Ipad connected to it.

If you use your own data it will likely cost more and not sure what kind of reception your carrier will have in Italy.
The Expresso Wifi device which was not expensive to rent is tiny (fits in a pocket) and switched to about 6 different carriers depending on who has the best signal.

I don't think Waze has a way to download the maps for later use offline, Google Maps does but to me that sounds risky if pre downloaded maps and no actual connection is going to be your main source of GPS. Sounds like a good back up plan.
Trip Advisor has many city guides that you can download and use with full functionality offline as well which is nice for many places in Italy.

"If you use your own data it will likely cost more and not sure what kind of reception your carrier will have in Italy."

Generally speaking, North American cell phones will have the same type of coverage as your Expresso Wi-Fi, depending on the roaming agreements negotiated between each network. In my experience over many years, I've found the my phone has a "preferred" network and will roam on that whenever possible. If no coverage is available on that network, the phone will switch to the next strongest signal.

I doubt that I'll ever use something like Expresso Wi-Fi as it's quite expensive. The rates listed on their website are €5 per day. My usual trips are about 30 days so that would cost €150 or about Cdn$225 with the exchange. My roaming charges are less than half that, and also include unlimited calls and texts.

Ken,
May not work for everyone, for me it ended up being the perfect GPS solution and thought I would pass that on.
We rented for 2 weeks and the total cost including hotel pick and drop off was 82 euro for 2 weeks.
I paid more than that for the Tom Tom with European maps which I foolishly purchased and renting a GPS from the car rental place would have been even higher.
So of the 3 options that seemed most obvious to me, the Expresso was cheapest and had many extra benefits.
Just pointing out even though we had a Tom Tom our smartphones with the wifi hotspot was highly preferred.

Some carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile have gotten quite aggressive with their international data plans and offer good rates. In our case my wife has AT&T and I have Verizon so we would have had to get 2 plans to use both phones add to that we wanted our daughter to be able to use an Ipad which is wifi only so for us a hot spot rental was a good deal ; we used an awful lot of data. I cannot go away from work for more than a day and not stay on top of emails so for me relying on hotel wifi doesn't work well.

"If you don't use a GPS at home, don't start in Italy."

Exactly my reason for recommending that, if you do want to use a GPS, get one here and learn how to use it before you go. There is definitely a learning curve. For instance, you need to know how to toggle the "avoid toll roads" switch on and off, and it's usually buried several menu screens down. Failure to set this properly will result in all kinds of problems (I speak from experience).

A further benefit of buying it beforehand, besides just learning how to use it, was mentioned above: you can pre-program it with your hotels and other destinations. This is a tremendous time saver, and even allows you to preview the route before you have to actually drive it.

You can buy a model with North American maps and pay to buy the European maps separately, or you can get a unit with both sets of maps already installed. Here's one of the latter: https://www.amazon.com/TomTom-1505M-Traveler-Navigator-Lifetime/dp/B00BHSTWOY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458428231&sr=8-1&keywords=gps+tomtom+europe

On our trips (Italy, France and Ireland) we've always used Google Maps on our phones and been very happy with it. We make sure to cache the map data for the areas we're going. So we don't use to much data and have access to them when we don't have a signal. I always recommend that people have paper maps. Its good to have a backup incase something happens to your phone or GPS.

Thank you for all the responses!! I think we are going to look into the Expresso WIFI. it will allow us to navigate and research along the way!!!

I'm a big believer in having a good GPS brought along from home. But, always - and I mean ALWAYS - also have a good paper map with you before you get in the car to drive. I have had my GPS lost/stolen, I have had one die, and have had several run out of juice (once I had the GPS plugged in to the car's power port, and the connector on the power plug broke off - I had about 2 hours before the battery died - no more GPS).

Finding a good map "over there" can be difficult or impossible. Bring one from home. Maybe you won't need it, but if your GPS goes south, the paper map backup will be a life-saver.

We used the nav function on our android phone - t mobile.
Worked great and no additional charges.

Just keep the phone plugged in - the nav function uses lots of power.

"Some carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile have gotten quite aggressive with their international data plans and offer good rates."

Yes, US carriers have started to figure out that they have to be competitive. We have Verizon and signed up for their International Travel plan. The rate is $10 for 24 hours, which starts the first time you use it. If you don't use it, there's no charge. It uses your current phone plan, which for us is unlimited text and calling and 40gig/month data.

We ended up not even using it on our trip in July. We had plenty of free Wi-Fi available and Facetimed instead of calling.

I've had no trouble driving in Tuscany and Umbria (and Provence, etc) with regional versions of Michelin paper maps, at a scale that shows more roads, such as #563 for Central Italy. Roads signs weren't bad, but you do need to plan out the route in advance, knowing through which smaller towns you want to travel. I have supplemented that with looking at Google Maps in the hotel, as well as some arrival directions in guidebooks. I now have a phone with T-Mobile service, should I need it in the future, but did not use it this year in England, when I had a buddy to read the map.