If you’re travelling to Crete for a holiday, and want to rent a vehicle at Heraklion airport, then you’ve probably been a bit confused by car rental prices. They fluctuate wildly from one provider to the next, and it’s often confusing. On paper, you get the same car, so why is it that the price for the rental is so much higher for one provider than for another? To try and help you understand what the problem is, we thought we would take a look at how car rental prices work.
The All-Inclusive Charge
So at Eurocar, we work according to the all-inclusive price system. When you pay for your vehicle, you’re paying for everything. Everything that you get is included in one price. This means things like the insurance, the pick-up fee, the drop-off fee, any extra parts that you might want, breakdown cover and stuff like that. We don’t believe it’s fair to suddenly stick you with an additional charge, which is why we do our best to ensure that we have an all-inclusive price.
Unfortunately, not all car rental services are created equally.
The Extra Charge System
So, how a lot of car rental companies get their money is through the extra charging system. We charge you one fixed rate for everything. However, some rental companies do it a bit differently. You have a base rate for renting the vehicle for a few days. After that, you get extra charges and costs.
So, let’s look at some actual numbers to help you understand how the process works a bit better. Let’s say that you wanted to hire a vehicle for three weeks. Now, if you hire from us, you’d have an all-inclusive cost. So, you’d wind up paying €600, as a random example. For your €600, you get the vehicle for three weeks; you also get insurance, breakdown cover, and anything else you might want.
A different car rental provider might charge you €450 as the base rate for hiring the vehicle. Then they might charge you €200 for the insurance. Then, they might charge you another €100 for the breakdown cover, €50 for picking it up the same day, and €50 for dropping it off again at the end. So, for the same three-week period and the exact vehicle, you would pay €850. That’s how car rental prices become so expensive because not everything is included in one fixed rate.
Word of Warning!
Something else you should be aware of is that many companies will charge you the extra costs when you get back with the car. So, you might think it’s cheap when you pick it up, but those additional charges come in at the end, and then it’s not worth the original value thought it was.
Final Thoughts
You’ve got to be careful when hiring vehicles at Heraklion airport. There are lots of car rental services that will charge you a lot of money, and this is so that they can get as much out of you as possible through extra charges. You want to work with someone like us because we will give you an all-inclusive cost of everything you pay. There are no additional charges; there are no sneaky add-ons; it’s just one easy rental.