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Originally Posted by CivicBlues
I looked into this as well for a potential trip to Ireland and it looks like it's a common headache for many travellers -agents forcing you to buy unnecessary insurance, hidden costs, charges for damages after return. Did you manage to convince the Car Rental Agency to waive any of the insurance they were trying to hawk at you?
It all sounds sketchy as hell and surprising from a 1st World European country. But then the alternative is taking public transport to and from all these remote places. Would you say that it's doable?
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The problem was in Dublin we were on foot to the rental agency and the next agency was like a 20 minute drive either back to the airport, or the other way. So we were kinda hooped we had expected to rent the vehicle and just get on our way in the morning to Dingle so we just said fuck it and bit the cost. The guy was a peice of shit though who worked at the rental agency and even when I pulled up the PDF for the capital one MasterCard that explicitly says “WAIVE ALL ADDITIoNAL COVERAGE” he wanted a personalized peice from capital one with our names on it stating that. I highly doubt any CC company is going to provide that.
I did a bit of research after that and basically it comes down to finding an agency you know will accept waiving it. There’s almost no other option. Some people on trip advisor etc. had more time than we did and basically shopped around in person until they found an agency that would waive them.
For our Peugeot 300D or whatever the SUV was called (actually very nice vehicle, comfortable to drive with good amenities) it was like $1000 CAD for 5 days..the insurance alone was over a quarter of the rental cost ffs..
There seem to be numerous tours that do this route but obviously far slower and you’re always constrained to the bus etc. also most bus tours regardless of size seem to be filled with elderly people so you’re at their will in terms of getting in and off the bus etc. a lot of the sites they stop at are boring af so I’d think it would feel like wasting your time spending an hour at some old ruins that barely resemble anything lol.
My parents are still in the UK touring Bathe, the Cotswolds, etc. and he said they tried to pull the same insurance shit at a diff agency there on him, I think he had a bit more flexibility and kind of strong armed them into waiving some of the fees but the UK seems notorious for this kind of rental car BS.. it sucks because it’s seemongly by far the best mode to get around.
And like I said, distances aren’t an issue. If you look at a map in terms of where Dublin is relative to a Dingle, 4 hours to get from complete opposite ends of the country is nothing. But yea I think it would be pretty painful on transit or a group tour