Car hire Geneva- French side of airport

[frillseeking]

Hi,
Has anyone hired a car from the French side of Geneva airport? It's working out to be much cheaper than hiring from the Swiss side but all I can see online is that it's not as easy but I'm not sure why. Wondering if anyone can shed any light. Thanks

French side won’t include the Swiss Vignette which is a stick you need to drive on Swiss motorways. So if you rent from the French side you cannot drive on the motorway whilst in Switzerland. So depends where you’re going as to whether or not you need the vignette. Straight to France, not using a motorway you’ll be fine.

That should be STICKER not stick. The Swiss don’t make you have a special stick in your car 🤣

In my experience, the hardest bit is returning the car to the French side, you have to know where to go as the airport signs don’t help as they go to the Swiss side.

@Merrilymerrilymerrily

In my experience, the hardest bit is returning the car to the French side, you have to know where to go as the airport signs don’t help as they go to the Swiss side.

Would you say it's doable though as such? It's a massive price difference so am keen to book the French side

@LakeShoreD

That should be STICKER not stick. The Swiss don’t make you have a special stick in your car 🤣

Ha ha! I got ya. Yes I've read about this- I read that some car hire companies provide it and others don't so I'll email them to ask

It's fine to bring it back to the French side. You just approach from France, there's a special road from the French side of the border at Ferney which takes you straight there. It's harder from Switzerland as it's a different country, despite being 20 m away. Just approach from France.

We hired from the French side once, the depot was miles away from the airport, a real hassle.

Check that you can pick up and drop off directly at the airport.

The motorway vignette is 40CHF, you can buy it in any petrol station and I think you can even buy it at the border crossing.

We've done it and it was fine. It was very hard to find the return entrance despite our best efforts - as a pp has said this might have been easier if we were approaching from France, and we did get there in the end! Just allow plenty of time as despite checking the route in advance we wasted about half an hour driving round the airport! Also bear in mind that it is quite a trek from the French car hire drop off point to the Swiss check in desks - pretty stressful when you're already running late and lugging children and car seats through the airport... Again if you know this in advance it's not really a problem.

Re the vignette - the car hire company would probably be able to sort this out for you if you ask in advance, or alternatively you can buy them at petrol stations in Switzerland.

We've done this several times. Its much cheaper. We didn't realise about the sticker and so didn't get one. Wouldn't recommend that though - we clearly were just lucky.

Thanks so much for all the info, much appreciated as it's not clear from Google!

superking how far would you say it is to check in? My mum actually can't walk that far so thinking this may be an issue

It was a couple of years ago now so I can't be sure I'm afraid. I think it took us about 20 minutes but we were making pretty slow progress as it was very busy and we had to wait a long time for the lift!

It’s definately doable, but you may need to leave extra time. I can’t be more help as, when I did it, I wasn’t the driver and my friend knew the route.