Iceland Car Rentals

Icelandcar is a consolidator. Why don't you just book directly with the rental companies they deal with? They list Avis, Thrifty, Budget, Dollar, and Alamo among their partners.

Yes I noticed that it just aggregates prices from other car rental companies. So I headed to the website of the rental company that had that price on icelandcar.com - route1carrental.is . The price at that website was about $228, so obviously quite a bit more expensive. Do you have any experience with car rentals in Iceland? Thanks!

I haven't rented in Iceland but I did a couple of dummy bookings with Thrifty and Budget, using the random date of June 22 for comparison. Thrifty has cars as low as $97 and Budget has them as low as $129.

Nancy, thank you for the help. The prices you list are actually for manual transmission and I am looking for automatic. I did revisit both of the recommendations that you had, and I actually found that the thrifty.com website is quite a bit less expensive then the thrifty.is(Iceland) website. I went ahead and booked from the US based site, and my compact car with automatic transmission came out to about $145USD. The only thing I am worried about now is that I found a website mentioning a pickup and drop-off fee from the airport of 29€ each time. That would be an extra $82 in fees! So I'm not really sure if that is built into the cost of the rentals or not, because it is not reflected on the receipt and I can't find any reference to it on the airport website. We will find out on our trip I suppose.

The airport fee is probably built into the price (that has been my experience in other places). To be clear, I wasn't necessarily recommending the two companies I chose, I just started with them to look at prices. You might want to keep "shopping" until your trip - sometimes a better deal will pop up along the way. You could then cancel your current reservation and go with the cheaper one (assuming Thrifty has no cancelation fee, and most companies don't).

The Northern Lights Inn (a great little inn right near the airport and the Blue Lagoon), recommends SS Car Rental to their guests (http://www.carrentalss.com/). I don't personally know anything about SS, but I trust the owner of the Inn and would feel very comfortable with any recommendation she made. Have fun in Iceland! Karen

When we visited it was for a bit longer but we found the established car rental companies were quite pricy. We ended up going with Islandiacar. We got a very good deal on a Subaru Impreza hatchback for a little over a week. The cars aren't brand new, which they tell you up front, but it was in great shape with an auxiliary input in the dash for our iPhone. It was great, and the car's reliability meant it was just no sweat. Miguel, our liason and I believe a co-owner of Islandiacar, was very helpful and friendly when I made a mistake on our arrival date and location. When we picked it up we stopped by a coffee shop and we walked through the paperwork quickly. They'll pick you up from your hotel if you like. The whole pickup process was painless and quick, a much faster experience then I've had going to some established car rental companies. Oh, and Miguel quickly contacted me about a watch I forgot about once I got back. Something he didn't have to do but makes your day. Probably too late for the guy who created the post, but for anyone else in a similar situation Islandiacar http://islandiacar.com was a pleasant experience and a good deal.