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A few years ago I made a deal with Budget Car Rental and they agreed to offer my readers an exclusive discount through the blog. It was a good deal because Budget already had low prices, especially in winter, and they were offering you guys an additional discount on top of that.

I was happy, you were happy and Budget was very happy because a lot of you took advantage of the offer.

Since then, a lot has changed. Budget decided that they no longer wanted to offer the discount but I kept on working with them because they were still offering competitive prices and the level of service I thought our guests deserved. At some point though, we started having technical problems that still have not been resolved despite numerous meetings and efforts on our part to come up with solutions.

Additionally, I started noticing a fluctuation in the prices that meant that sometimes they were really good but oftentimes they were not so great. The technical issues I mentioned before are partly to blame for this.

As of late, we’ve also had some issues with their customer service due to the nature of our agreement. It’s resulted in bad customer experience for our guests which to us is unacceptable. Although these issues are not really anyone’s fault, our guests just deserve better.

Because of all of this, I have decided that I will no longer offer direct bookings with Budget here on the blog. I cannot in good conscience recommend something that is simply not up to our standards.

It’s important to mention though that these problems, both the technical issues and subpar service, are specific to this agreement and the technology we were using and they do not necessarily reflect on their overall customer experience. I have nothing against them as a company and I wish they had been able to offer some alternative solutions so we could continue on with this cooperation with them.

Alternative options

Since I made the deal with Budget, my husband and I have traveled quite a lot outside of Iceland and when we do, we always use booking.com to book our accommodation and its sister company rentalcars.com to book our car rentals.

For destinations outside of Iceland, at least, rentalcars.com has always proved to be more economical than renting directly with the car rental companies and I like the fact that you can compare prices and what’s included in each package right on the page. Because of the competition on the page, the prices are often very competitive and you can score some extra stuff (like a free additional driver) to save money.

If you are a part of some kind of rewards system or have direct deals with certain international car rental brands, it’s probably worth checking that first before you book anything.

I also like the fact that rentalcars.com makes it easy to modify the booking or cancel it but most of the problems our guests had with Budget was with changes and cancellations. You can basically cancel with one click and you don’t have to call anyone or send e-mails that don’t get replied to.

What prompted me to write this post now is the fact that my husband and I just booked a car with rentalcars.com this week for an upcoming trip to Europe and it reminded me of why I like using it. There are other similar services out there, like AutoEurope.eu for example, but since I have never booked through them myself I cannot comment on their service.

One thing I found quite helpful when we were researching which car to book for our upcoming trip was that AutoEurope seemed to have more information about details of the contract (like the fact that you have to pay a fee to cross borders in Europe or that certain types of cars cannot be booked if you plan to travel to Italy) but because the prices were generally better on Rentalcars.com – we used AutoEurope for research purposes only. Apparently, they price match though but I’m a busy lady and didn’t have time to figure out how that works.

I did look AutoEurope.eu up online while doing research for this post and I see that a lot of American travelers, in particular, talk very well about them and recommend them on Tripadvisor and other similar forums. They especially mentioned how helpful their customer service hotline is and even Rick Steves recommends them. So they might be worth checking out too.