[ TIPS · THE DISPATCH ]

Renting a Car Abroad Without Getting Buried in Insurance Upsells

Renting a car abroad tips from someone who's argued at a hundred rental counters: the CDW you probably already have, the photograph-everything ritual, and how to drive on the 'wrong' side without dying.

The best renting a car abroad tips I can give you start at the counter, before you’ve signed anything, when a very nice person is about to gently relieve you of an extra forty euros a day. Because that’s where the trip gets won or lost. The driving? The driving you’ll figure out. It’s the paperwork that eats people alive.

Let me back up. The first time I rented abroad — Lisbon, a tiny Fiat the color of a traffic cone — I said yes to every box. CDW, super-CDW, theft protection, tire-and-windscreen, roadside something. The agent, a guy named Rui who I’m sure is lovely, just kept nodding and ticking. By the time I drove out I’d nearly doubled the rate. Nobody tells you this is optional. It mostly is.

Here’s the thing the counter will never say out loud. A lot of the “collision damage waiver” they’re upselling, you may already carry. Lots of mid-tier and premium travel credit cards include rental car collision coverage as a perk, secondary or sometimes primary, if you pay for the rental with that card and decline the rental company’s own CDW. Call the number on the back of your card before the trip and ask the exact question: “do you cover collision damage on international rentals, and is it primary or secondary.” Write down the answer. Bring it.

Now — read me clearly here, because this is where people get burned. Card coverage usually does NOT include third-party liability. That’s the insurance that pays the other car, the wall, the unlucky moped. In a lot of countries basic liability is bundled into the rental by law, but you have to confirm it’s actually there. So my move is: decline the CDW upsell (card’s got it), keep or buy the liability, walk away.

One more wrinkle. Some agents will “block” a giant deposit on your card if you decline their CDW — like, a 1,500 euro hold. That’s legitimate, not a scam, it’s their fallback if you wreck it. Just make sure your card has the room, or it’ll get declined and you’ll be standing there sweating.

This one’s non-negotiable and it has saved me money twice. Before you pull out of that lot, you do a slow walk-around with your phone and you film the entire car. Every panel. Every existing scratch, the alloy wheels (curb rash is a classic phantom charge), the windscreen, the roof, the interior, the fuel gauge, the odometer. Narrate it. Say the date and the location out loud while you film. “June whatever, Faro airport, here’s the dent that’s already on the rear bumper.”

Why so paranoid? Because the scam — and at certain shady outfits it absolutely is a scam — is to charge you on return for damage that was there all along, or that’s invisible to you and obvious to them. A waiter friend in Sicily who’d worked the rental desk in a previous life told me they had a literal list of cars with “soft” pre-existing scratches that got re-billed to tourist after tourist. Your video is the thing that makes that argument disappear.

And get the agent to sign the damage diagram. That little car outline with the X’s on it. If a scratch isn’t marked and it’s there, make them mark it. Don’t be shy. The shy renter is the billed renter.

Okay. The actual scary part, which is less scary than you think. If you’re going somewhere they drive on the opposite side from home, the single best thing you can do is pick up the car somewhere quiet, not in a city center at rush hour. Give yourself twenty minutes of empty road to recalibrate.

A few hard-won truths. The pedals are the same — clutch, brake, gas, left to right, even with the steering wheel on the other side, so your feet are fine. It’s your hands and your sense of “where am I in the lane” that drift. The gearstick will be on the hand you never shift with, which feels deeply wrong for about an hour and then doesn’t. Roundabouts are where brains melt; just remember you go the opposite rotational direction and yield to whoever’s already in it.

The trick that genuinely helped me: your body should be toward the center line. If you’re hugging the edge, scraping hedges, you’ve drifted — recenter so your seat is near the middle of the road. And if you’ve got a passenger, deputize them. “Tell me if I’m too close on your side” is a perfectly manly thing to say and it’ll save your mirrors.

Go slow. Let the tailgaters tailgate. Pull over and let them pass, you’re on holiday and they’re late for work, those are different problems. I drove the whole Ring of Kerry at roughly grandpa speed and had a wonderful day, and yeah I definately white-knuckled the first hour. By the afternoon I forgot I was doing anything unusual at all.

Rent the smallest car you can stand. Foreign roads, especially old-town lanes and mountain switchbacks, were not built for your idea of a normal-sized car. Smaller is cheaper, sips less fuel, and squeezes into parking spots that would’ve ended a marriage in a bigger vehicle.

Decline the upsell you already pay for, film the car like it’s a crime scene, drive like your grandmother’s watching — and the only thing you’ll remember from the rental counter is how much you didn’t spend.

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