Need to hire a car in France - need some suggestions please!

[IwishIwasmoreorganised]

We've never hired a car before, but will be going to SW France and staying at a Siblu Park over Easter so will need a car.

Can anybody recommend a good but cheap car hire company, and are there any things we should look out for (I don't know whether we should be paying for excess waivers etc)?

Thanks for your help.

Have you tried Travelsupermarket? Or another comparison site? I alwasy start with them and then check out the cheaper companies.

We have always found Car Hire 3000 excellent.

One to definitely avoid is Europcar, from Nice airport anyway.

Totally shambolic service. We were queueing for 4 hours to pick up car last time.

Got talking to someone in the queue who told us they are always like that. Not sure why they keep booking with them though

We'll be flying into Bordeaux.

It can be a good idea to pay for the excess waivers so you have nothing (or very little) to pay if the car is damaged. In France people have no respect for other peoples' cars. All the minor dents in my car have been made by other people in car parks (I live in France).

It is my understanding with car hire (certainly me hiring with Avis in the UK) that you have to pay for any damage, regardless of fault. If somebody else crashes into your hire car, can you afford paying an excess of several hundred pounds? If not, you may want to reduce your liability.

If you are planning on taking out the excess waiver, having an additional driver hiring child seats, sat nav etc try and find out how much they will be with each company you are considering. You might need to call the company up to find out. They are not normally included in the quoted price. What initially looks like the cheapest quote may not be the cheapest once the cost of any extras is included.

And my theory with avoiding Europcar on holiday is this:
They are the car rental partner with easyJet. Therefore almost everybody else you were sat on the plane with has also rented a car with Europcar. You all get off the plane together and then all 150 of you go and queue up at Europcar (and the other car rental companies have no queue). And it gets even worse somewhere like Nice where there are lots of easyJet flights arriving from all over the UK at the same time during the summer...

Ah, good hinking about why the queues can be so bad with certain companies at certain times.

We're flying with bmibaby, so I'll see who theire rental partner is and try to avoid them!

I hadn't realy thought about extras though. We can take our own car seats and sat nav so that should make things cheaper, but the exess waiver ould probably be a good idea.

Thanks for all of your help.

I wasn't on Easyjet so, no it wasn't that.

I had just arrived on a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt.

Anyway, best avoided.

We have used Carhire 3000 twice in France, once from Nice airport and once from CDG. No problems either time and they were excellent at rearranging and reimbursing when our outgoing flight was cancelled on the day of our flight this year.

I do always pay the waiver which I think was something like an extra £40 just in case.