Hire car USA - don't want to pay $14 a day for GPS. Also top-up car insurance...

[BreakfastCricket]

We're using Avios points towards hiring a car in the US this summer. This is great because it's only costing £155 for 16 days. Has anyone successfully used their iPhone or iPad in their hire car to help with sat nav? Or the other option is to buy a GPS system in Walmart for $100. Just interested to know what others do... or are thinking of...

Was also thinking of buying a car insurance policy top up for the USA before we leave. Anyone got any recommendations, please?

Does using an iPhone/iPad use up data allowance?

can't recommend a company, but buy all your insurance here, it will cost you a lot more if you wait until you get to the States.

map books are cheap in the States. And in the UK now!

Buy the sat nav and flog it on eBay when you get back?

Ruby I've been tracking prices both on ebay UK and eBay USA for the last fortnight or so for GPS and they seem to hold their value quite well so this is definitely an option. I'm fortunate enough to have a friend who's over in Kentucky just now who has offered to visit Walmart and bring one home. For the last week or so that's been my favourite option.

However I want to check out the iPad idea as that would be even easier and cheaper but as Soup suggests I need to find out the specifics.

And as Special confirms I thought I read somewhere that buying here was considerably cheaper. The figure £60 come to mind.

Can you borrow a SatNav from someone? We have an one we never use because all the cars have built in ones. We only keep it for taking on holiday by us or friends/family.

Or just buy a map - that's what we did on trips to the states pre SatNav invention. It was always quite easy as the roads are clearly sign posted.

Silas I've always been happy to read a map but my eyesight has got to that icky stage where when we're moving I can't follow the small print any more!

Buy satnav in Walmart - they might have a deal instore that's not on the website. If you get Garmin, you can buy and download european mapping when you get back for about £35 (I think -prices may have gone up since I did this a couple of years ago).

Ah yes - I've just had to get reading glasses so I can relate to that!

Do you have dc you could train up as navigators. Mine are quite good now they can read (I once tried with a bright 3 year old - it did not end well!)

Silas We have a Duke of Edinburgh Silver participant so will try that as back up!

Bright three year olds shouldn't be underestimated. At that age mine were expert video technicians but it never occured to me to deploy them in other tasks. I missed a trick. Very impressed by your ingenuity and early delegation.

Checked out car hire excess insurance and for 16 days it is cheaper in some instances to get an annual policy. Have seen various annual policies at £49, £59 and £79 so will probably compare what's covered and try to go with something near the £49 end.

Have decided that we will try our IPad with a free app for the first few days and if it doesn't work then we'll head for the nearest GPS discount electronic store and buy a Garmin or Tom Tom and then ebay it on our return.

For the initial journey between car rental pick up and our accommodation I will print off directions and bring them with me.

Still interested to hear of any iPad sat nav experiences though as I'm not sure which app to download...

There are sat nav hire companies in uk.weve been to USA a couple of times and have just rented a sat nav which is delivered to your door..there not expensive to hire and think you can get for any country

livvyliv you are clever. Just worked out that we can hire one for £40 just as you suggest. There might even be other companies so I can get the price down. That's a definite contender. Thank you. Please feel free to offer any more tips.

Have just hired our car and we're getting a Ford Kuga/ Escape for £10 a day so £160.

We had this dilemma last summer. Couldn't face paying the exhorbitant satnav hire fee. We printed off a few relevant maps before we went, but ds bought his ipad over there (birthday present and they're slightly cheaper out there) and every now and then he'd pipe up with sat nav directions. No idea how - maybe it was when we passed through a free wifi area. Wasn't often enough to be reliable however.

Just back. In the end we were like Clam and did not use a GPS - I left it too late to hire and anyway we thought we would try our luck with the IPad before shelling out.

Well the iPad was super although having hard copies of printed maps was also essential. We just used google maps and weren't reliant on any apps.

Turned out my 16-year-old was a whizz navigator and very competently gave directions from the back.

we have just driven 2,500 miles in the USA without sat nav and can't say we missed it. what is useful is that hire cars have a compass as part of the dashboard.
have you got CWD sorted out? You should have this, and many of the cheaper companies will not include it in their price.
We hired through Alamo, and when we went to pick the car up at Denver Airport they tried to take advantage of our being jet lagged to sell us extra accidental cover. Also, car hire companies will always waste time trying to get you to hire a larger car than you had planned.

We are just back and DH used SatFree on the Nexus rather than hire SatNav (or buy the maps for our own). It worked very well, and she was less annoying than the Sat Nav we have here.

We have bought one off Ebay from someone who hires them out for America, he has also very nicely programmed all of our hotels into it!

Hi, I'm currently backpacking around the USA with my three year old and writing a blog about what were discovering on the way sallyhutchinson1.wordpress.com/. I brought my Tom Tom from England with me and uploaded the USA maps onto it. It cost me £30 and I've used it loads and it works fine. Car hire companies charge way too much for these kind of things.

There's uk companies that hire sat nav for the USA . We have used them twice with no problems. They send it to your uk address and you send back when you get home.

We're just going to use some sort of GPS app on the iphone. $14 a day Satnav hire for 3 weeks racks up, and we won't necessarily be doing that much driving (California).

Not entirely confident it's going to work, so may still end up killing each other

Where will you be driving?
We drove alot last year and it was v helpful to have satnav to get to and from the hire place as they're always in obscure location but otherwise coup have probably managed without if was going to have been expensive- we'd said no to it but on collecting the car were asked if we wanted one and got to something like a dollar a day
Posh cars have them built in sometimes too

If you use your iphone as normal it will cost an arm and a leg as every time the map refreshes you are eating up data. I think you can buy a dedicated SatNav app which store the data on your phone so don't use roaming but they tend to be quite expensive. Although I guess you can use it over and over again so probably cheaper long term than hiring a SatNav.