Car rental in Andalusia (Spain): test and opinion of Goldcar
While being in Seville, we wanted to take a 4-day excursion to discover Andalusia.
The question of car rental and the choice of company then arose.
In Seville, there is a choice. The giants of the sector are present: Avis, Hertz, Sixt, Europcar, …
But also low cost rental companies (Alamo, Goldcar, …).
There are two rental hubs, one at the airport and one at the train station.
Low-cost rental companies offer unbeatable prices, but the reviews on the internet are scary and many people are screaming for scams of fraud.
Renting a car is always a bit anxious because the car rental company takes a bank imprint of your card and can “use” it in case of a problem without asking you too much.
After a little study of the sources of litigation, it seems that they are mainly of three kinds:
- Rentals without repurchase of franchise. Hirers block 1,200 € on your card at the time of the rental and are very creative afterwards to reproach you and charge you for more or less imaginary damages.
- Gasoline costs. Hirers are also full of inventiveness to offer you various and varied formulas. “Pay only for the petrol you consume”, “Return the car empty”, … It’s a golden rule when you rent a car, you must always choose the formula where you return the car with a full tank of gas, otherwise the bill will be steep.
- Renting a badge to pay for the highway. Not quite understood what it was for, but those who talked about it in the reviews on the internet were furious, explaining that it cost a fortune and that it was useless. This badge was not offered to us.
So we made the choice to choose the cheapest renter with the following options:
- No deductible if it’s a classic car rental company
- With full franchise buy-back if it is a low cost lessor.
Goldcar was the cheapest in this little game.
Prices can vary a lot so test with your own dates, no guarantee that this is always the case.
Goldcar
For 4 days of rental, Goldcar offered us 125 € broken down as follows:
- Vehicle rental: 44 €
- Redemption of franchise: 60 €
- VAT : 21 €
It’s quite frustrating to find out that you pay more for insurance than for renting, but that’s the price of tranquility.
This amounts to 31 € of rental per day. Quite far from the 13 € / day without the repurchase of franchise. This remains an excellent price, lower than the price of traditional renters without the franchise buyback (around 35 / 40 € per day on average).
In this formula are included 250 km / day which is enough for us.
The recovery of the car did not pose any difficulty. Our interlocutor spoke English which facilitated the exchanges.
I had my international driver’s license but the national license was enough.
Goldcar still blocked an amount of 150 € on our card for gas. This amount will be released once we return the car with a full tank.
The car was in very good condition, 15,000 km on the odometer.
No bad surprises in the end, everything went well and we will not hesitate to come back to Goldcar for a next rental.
