Expensive car hire in Italy

[Lunificent]

We are looking at hiring a car for 11 days from Genoa airport in August. It seems much more more expensive than it was when we were last abroad. The lowest price we’ve found is £559 for a tiny car.
Does anyone have any tips on how we can get a better deal? Thanks

have you looked on holiday extras?

IME car hire has gone through the roof since the pandemic. They are presumably trying to claw back some of the profit they lost through no one travelling for a year. And in the process making it prohibitively expensive - we drove to Ireland at Christmas because the ferry was the same price as the flights and we'd still have to hire a car on top of that.

My SIL did hire a car, but waited till almost the last minute and it was cheaper, but she had other options if she couldn't get one.

Previously we've got a car more cheaply through a third party (look on money saving expert), but we've also been stung by accidentally paying on the wrong card and not been able to change it because it was through a third party agent, so be careful of that!

We have had a similar issue recently, we wanted a hire car in Sardinia for 12 days but the absolute cheapest quote I could find for a tiny car was £800. The cost of going on holiday there was getting far too expensive so we've cancelled it and are going to Greece instead where we don't need to hire a car!

I'm in Italy and fuel prices have gone through the roof. There are currently blockades from haulage firms on the motorway near me because of the rising costs.
Nothing to do with Covid.

Do make sure you take lots of pictures of the car before renting it.

An Italian company (can't remember the name) tried to charge us for damage that was there when we hired the car.

We always book through holiday autos and manage to get reasonable deals

Car hire has risen in cost generally.

Take loads of pictures and additional insurance.

We ended up with a tiny scratch - got charged for it as 'medium dent'. I don't think they had a category of minor dent.

Thanks for all advice. We realised that one reason the price was so high was that we wanted an evening pick up. We’ve decided to stay overnight at an airport hotel and pay a lot less for a morning pick up.