Car hire virgin, Tom Tom abroad?

[minxthemanx]

Have never hired a car abroad but am taking the plunge thus summer at Carcassonne, France. Two quick questions: will our TomTom automatically work in France, or do we have to do something before we go? Need satnav to get to campsite. Secondly, where is the best place to get cdw before we go? Many thanks.

It will depend whether you have the relevant maps in it! You can download updated maps if not.

Re cdw - you definitely want to get it before you go. Have a look on Money Saving Expert - there is advice on there.

icarhire insurance have special offer. 35.99 I think for annual cover which works out cheaper than daily for a fortnight.

It depends on the make of your satnav and the model. With our old TomTom, DH had to order the USA maps on SD card and it took about 10-14 days to arrive. He recently ordered European maps for our Garmin online & they came as a download & it was instant.

One thing to be aware of is that, if you are visiting a country that uses characters /accented letters not in our usual UK Latin alphabet, your UK satnav will struggle to find towns/streets etc because they are not typed in correctly. I suspect you can change the character set, but we had forgotten to take the manual on the road trip where this caused a problem.

Thanks everyone, good advice as usual. Our TomTom is less than a year old and I'm fairly sure it has European maps on it, so hopefully will just work once we switch on at Carcassonne.

Why not try putting the address of the campsite in now? It should produce a route, and then you'll know it has the right maps.

If it hasnt got European maps on it, there's no need to pay for European maps. We've just navigated round Italy using a smartphone and Navmii. Its free to download and works offline so no roaming data charges.

Just some general advice about car hire:
Don't get pushed into upgrading,

• inspect the car thoroughly before you leave the car park and take meticulous photos of any minor scratches etc and make sure they are marked on your hire document before you drive away- no point trying to defend it after you are responsible for the car if they claim later any damage was down to you.
• Make sure you check whether you return the car full or empty of fuel (full is better so you can top up just before you hand back rather than "gifting" them 1/4 tank rather than risk running out on the last leg of your journey).
• Also make sure before you go that you have sufficient credit limit on your credit card as despite any additional insurance you buy in advance, they usually "block" up to ?1000 on your card until your hire is complete - just make sure that leaves you enough to do your shopping etc.

despite any additional insurance you buy in advance,

This is a key point about waiver insurance you buy in advance: you need to be able to pay the hire company and then reclaim, and the hire company reserves the credit. So you need a credit limit equal to all the waivers you are insuring elsewhere (or self-insuring) plus the cost of your holiday.