Article by dave townley

Many people believe that the first thing you should do to plan a trip is to figure out where you want to go. In a way this is correct, but only in a general sense. For example, say on your next trip to Europe you want to visit France, Spain and Italy. This is fine and you should have an idea of this to begin with. The reason that I wrote the previous three articles in the order I did: Car Size & Type, Price and Insurance, is that I feel you should have a good idea of what it is you need before you decide on what it is you want. The same is true of airfare and hotel accommodations as well but here we are only talking about planning the car rental part of the trip.

Once you know your requirements in relation to your budget. It’s time to decide how much time you’ll have and how far you can drive, and the routes you want to take. There are several excellent programs on the internet for determining driving times and distances between two locations. For Europe, I recommend Mappy, since it is very detailed and will give you some idea of landmarks to look for while driving, along with toll information for longer stretches. If you have the processing power, Google Earth is also a really neat program to work with, although it is much more complicated. Make sure you have the address (including postal code) of the place you are leaving from and arriving to. Most of the time this will be from one hotel to the next, or between the hotel and the car rental company. Try to find a rental location that is both near to your hotel and a highway on-ramp. This is increasingly important depending on the size and population of the city you are driving into. Surprisingly enough I have yet to find a program that easily maps from one European airport to another, although MapoRama hits it sometimes. Route 66 software will get you the distances between airports but not the written out directions or toll information.

Now that you know how to get where you are going, it’s time to figure how how much and how long it will take to get there. If you are doing pretty straightforward highway driving you can take the distance given to you in the mapping program and divide it by 60 (or 96 if it was given to you in kilometers) and this will give you a rough approximation of travel time. Remember that if you are planning on doing some sightseeing, allow yourself at least twice this number. Although you did rent a car to get from one place to the other in the most efficient way, it doesn’t do you any good to miss all the sights. That’s what you came to Europe for, right?