With over 120 vehicle rental businesses on charming Tenerife as well as a confusing number of Tenerife car hire agents, choosing which car hire company to go for can be a tiresome incident.
Do you select a familiar name, and then learn an just as reputable local car hire firm is a large amount cheaper? Do you choose a company only to discover when you arrive that they don’t have an office near to where you’re staying? At Cheap Tenerife Car Rental we believe that if we’re encouraging you to explore Tenerife’s countryside, then we should also provide some information to help you decide which car rental business on Tenerife is best suited to your particular needs, so we’ve compiled this guide to help the decision making process.
Taking your hire car to La Gomera
Some people want to know if they can take their hire car to other Islands. Most car leasing businesses on Tenerife don’t allow this. Some, like CICAR, allow you to take your hire car to La Gomera only. However, the cost for taking a rental car, plus two passengers to La Gomera can be around €145 on the Fred Olson ferry and around €130 on the Naviera Armas ferry, so it might work out cheaper to rent a car once you’re there.
Petrol prices on Tenerife
Petrol is considerably cheaper in the Canary Islands than in many other places; at the time of writing, around €0.80 per litre for unleaded (sin plomo 98), obviously this changes. The island is well served by petrol stations, so most of the time you don’t have to be concerned about running out of fuel. However there are some awfully long stretches where there aren’t any stations and we’ve included warnings about these areas in our website. There are also important differences in prices between various companies on Tenerife. PCAN and Texaco are by and large a few cents cheaper per litre than BP, Shell and Repsol with CEPSA falling somewhere in between.
Parking
It seems common sense, but having read the occasional report on travel watchdog websites of people having their hire car towed away, I’m not so sure. Treat parking exactly as you would at home. Don’t park on yellow lines and be cautious where you see blue lines; these ordinarily mean you need to feed the parking meter. Above all don’t presume that because everyone else is double parked, parking on crossings, corners and everyplace there is the smallest space, that you can do the same, unless you want to invoke sod’s law.
Insurance
It’s worth checking with your car insurance company if your policy covers you when driving abroad. If it does, you may not need insurance through the car hire firm on Tenerife.
