Introduction
Hey everybody, it’s Ismail Siddiky. Welcome back to the site. I hope you are having a fantastic day. Thank you so much for your continued support. If you’re new and just found me, I like to talk about Portugal, moving and living here, as well as some Europe travel news as they get to it. Today is a fantastic question response. Thank you to Safel Mibo. He asked this question. He was saying, “Hey, if we move to Portugal and we’re living here on a day-to-day basis, we don’t want to have a car. Can we get a rental car? And if so, do we have to just live in Lisbon and Porto to do it? Or can we do it throughout the country? How does it work?” So I want to talk about “Rent a Car in Portugal.”
The Rental Car Process
The rental car process if you’re living here is no different than if you’re a visitor and you’re coming for a vacation or holiday, but there are more options than what you may think are available just coming into one of the airports in Portugal. So here it goes. If you’re going to be here and you’re going to live without a car like us, we have over the last three plus years used a car on the weekend. Sometimes we’ve taken one for a week to drive into Spain or to drive to different parts of Portugal. It’s been no issue whatsoever and there are plenty of options, so let’s go through it.
Rental Locations Across Portugal
You might believe that well, we can only get a car in Porto, Lisbon, Faro, maybe Fundão and Meira, and that’s not really the case. There are numerous rental car agencies. All of the major rental car agencies in North America and Europe have offices here now. Yes, many of those locations are Porto, Lisbon, the Algarve, Madeira, a couple of the Amor Islands. But there are many smaller companies too that do rental cars. And as you look at the map here, I wanted to pull up Google Maps for Portugal and just show you that it is more than just Porto, Lisbon, and the Algarve. As you can see in Northern Portugal, there are a number of locations that you can get a rental car. So depending on where you live, you may not be close if you’re close to the mountains or Spain. But as you get closer to the coast, as you can see, there are more options, of course, in Lisbon, not just at the airport, but throughout the city and the region. You can find many rental car options there. And then as you look to the south, there are many locations in the Algarve from Lagos all the way to the Spanish border where you can find a rental car agency if you choose to use the vehicle for a few days a week or if you need it for a longer period of time.
Rental Options in Madeira and the Azores
I also wanted to point out because oftentimes I talk about the mainland in Portugal, but many of you are looking to live or move to Madeira or the Azores. As you’re looking here, Madeira has many options for rental cars, so you don’t need one. If you’re living there, you can always go to an agency and rent one. And then most of the islands in the Azores archipelago have a couple of rental car agencies. Generally, those with airports have at least an agency, if not a few options to choose from.
Insights from Rental Agencies
As you can see here, you have a lot to work with, and what I wanted to do next is I went to the airport and I sat down with a representative from Hertz, and then I went to a representative from Sixt, and then I went to a representative from Europcar because I wanted to get a perspective not just from maybe tourists coming in from different countries, but people that live here that will use the cars, and I wanted to ask them some questions. So here’s some of the feedback I got from them, and I hope this will be useful to you.
Renting within the City vs. Airport
I asked them if oftentimes it’s cheaper to rent a car within the city as opposed to the airport because oftentimes there’s extra fees and taxes added to the car rental if you get it right at the airport. In all cases, most of them said that that is generally true. There may be an extra charge or two that’s added if you’re getting it at the airport as opposed to going into, let’s say, Faro, Lisbon, Porto and renting from the same agency but within the city. They said it’s not always the case, but there are some situations where you may get a better deal if you, let’s say, take a bus, train, or metro depending on where you’re coming in from and get to an agency in the city as opposed to at the airport.
High Tourist Season
Of course, they all mentioned that the high tourist season draws a premium to the vehicle price and they said the tourist season is really from mid-March through late September. They said it’s now because Portugal’s become more of a trendy place to come. That line used to be more just summertime, but now it’s stretching into this early spring through late fall, where the rental car prices are much higher. We’ve noticed it through the three years where we might rent on a weekend in July. Let’s say that rental for a compact car is 300 euros. We’ve often found we’ve actually rented on the same weekend a year later and it was about 150 euros more from the same place and the same car, just based upon supply and demand.
Winter Rental Challenges
They did say this, so I want to make sure that you’re aware of a few things. If you are in the Algarve, you’re in Madeira, or the Azores, they all said that they reduce their fleet in the winter months. So what I’m guessing is either they just don’t have them in inventory or maybe they shipped them back to the mainland. I’m not necessarily sure what they meant by that, but they did say in the wintertime, it may be a little more difficult getting a vehicle in the Algarve area or on the islands Madeira or Azores. So if you’re looking for something, you may want to just book farther ahead.
Last-Minute Rentals
I did ask about that. That’s something that many of you may be asking about. “Hey, if we just want to go to Madrid for the weekend and it’s Thursday, can we rent a car for Friday and leave? Or do we have to book far in advance?” They said, unlike most transportation here, where you can book a flight a day or two early, and it’s a low-cost flight and easy to get to Madrid, let’s say, trains and buses, you can often get last-minute tickets. They said the rental car process is not the case for whatever reason. They said they really don’t have a huge inventory of rental cars, so oftentimes you may need to, if you’re living in Portugal, look at maybe booking as far as a month in advance. If you’re looking to use the car, that’s something to keep in mind. It’s not just, “Well, I need it for the weekend and I’m just going to book it tonight for tomorrow.” They would really advise against that. You do need to get it a little farther in advance.
Automatic vs. Manual Transmission
A couple of things to keep in mind: they have a more limited stock of automatic cars, so automatic transmissions versus manual or stick. So when you’re looking at rental car prices, all of them said, generally, there’s a little difference, a little more for an automatic as opposed to a manual or a stick shift. Not always the case, but they said, especially in the tourist season, if they’re getting a lot of people from North America that might be used to more automatics, they’ll charge more for that versus having a stick. The great thing here is that you’re driving on the same side of the road as North America, so it’s not like if you’re in, let’s say, the UK and you’re in a different seat and you’re shifting with, let’s say, your left hand versus your right hand. That would throw many people off here. If you have used or you have used a manual shift in the past, you may want to do it here and look for a vehicle because it might save you a few dollars for doing that.
Using GPS and Tolls
A couple of things as well that you may want to think about: often we use our phone for everything. We live here, so if you’re living here often, you’ll have a Portuguese plan for your phone and data, and that’s what we use for our GPS. Not everyone may have that set up, but we use it, and it seems to work really well. If you’re really concerned about that, then you can always make sure that the car has GPS set up.
And the other thing to keep in mind here, and this is both for people that are looking to live in Portugal but also to vacation or holiday here, is we do have tolls. The major highways do have a toll system in place, so you will want to ask at the time of your rental if you do have the ability to just drive through those tolls. There are a couple of lanes that you have to slow down to go through, but then it gives you kind of the green light so you can drive through without having to stop and actually do a transaction for the toll fee. Most, I think everyone that I talked to and every company that we’ve used here, which are, I think, six to date, they all have had the ability where they had the little mechanism in the vehicle that was the toll reader, so we didn’t have to stop every so many kilometers and put money in or do something with a cashier.
Insurance Considerations
I will say for those of you that are moving specifically from America here and are living here and are using an American credit card, you may be used to waiving, I’ll say, Collision or the Insurance portion during the rental car process, because you said, “Hey, I don’t need it. My credit card will cover damages up to a certain amount.” Here in Portugal, we’ve tried that with a Mastercard, a Visa, and an American Express card, and they said that it doesn’t work that way here—that we still had to elect a portion or some type of, I’ll say, damage protection, collision, or insurance on the vehicle. So I just want to make sure that that can be a pain point for some people because we were used to for years saying, “Hey, we don’t need the insurance; our credit card will take care of that.” If something were to happen here, it’s not the case.
Conclusion
I just wanted to talk about this, and I want to again thank Lu Case-twenty for offering this as an idea because many of us living here in Portugal that we met at our expat meetings don’t have a vehicle at all. We use public transportation or we use our feet to get around or we use airplanes to get to, obviously, different countries. But when we do want something, when we’re in Lisbon, we’ve gone up to Douro to the wine country, we’ve gone to the Algarve often, and if we want to go to some places that are, let’s say, harder to get to by train or bus, we’ll rent a car to get to them, and it’s an easy procedure. It works whether you’re on vacation or you’re living here; the process is the same, and I just wanted to show and highlight that you don’t have to live just in Lisbon or Porto to be able to get what you have more access to from Lisbon, up through Porto and even north to Braga and then even to the south throughout the Algarve, as well as Madeira and the Azores.
I hope you find this blog useful. I hope when you’re coming to Portugal, you are trying to explore and see as much as you can of this country because for a smaller country, it’s just jam-packed with worth of stuff. So as always, thank you so much for taking the time to read the blog. I hope you find it useful; please share it if you think it is useful and enjoy your travels.
