Car Hire & Rental Pick Up.

When you arrive at the car rental desk, whether it be Dollar, Alamo or Budget, you will need to produce your UK driving licence, both parts, for all the drivers that are on your vehicle rental agreement. You will also need your rental voucher. You will have received this either with your travel documents if you have booked a package holiday or if you booked it direct from one of the many car rental suppliers on the net. Generally there is a queue/line here and you normally wait around 20 minutes. Sometimes if there are a group of people in your party it would be a good idea to get the driver/drivers to go straight to the rental desks whilst the rest of the group attend to the luggage. It is important that all drivers sign the rental agreement for insurance purposes. You will have to leave a credit card imprint at the desk and, depending what type of reservation you have, you have to pay for a tank of fuel at inflated prices, meaning you can bring the vehicle back empty. They may try to talk you into upgrading your vehicle, unless you really do want to, don’t bother. It’s more expensive to do it that way and also you will probably get the vehicle they are trying to get you to upgrade to anyway as they have run out of your type of vehicle. The latest thing now is to give  you the option of a daily fee to use the tolls free of charge. This may be of some benefit for those that have to pass through tolls quite regularly to get to and from the accommodation. I believe that you only get charged if you use it, so if you don't pass through a toll for 3 days then there is no charge. If you do pass through one 10 times one day you only pay the daily rate. Apart from that don't bother with any of the insurance top ups that they offer if you have purchased all inclusive from the UK.

Dollar Car Rental:
They will allocate a car for you based on the voucher you have they more than likely will try to talk you into an upgrade. One thing that may be of interest, if you decide to visit Florida on a regular basis, or every year, you can go to the dollar website and sign up for their "Dollar Express" card. Online you submit all your driving licence details etc. They are then stored on the system and they have a special express line at the desks which has hardly anyone in it, so this can really speed things up.

Alamo Car Rental:
They will allocate you a car based on your voucher and again will try to get you to upgrade and do all the things Dollar do. You then go to the garage and get to pick the car that you want from your category section of the garage. Nice if you don’t like Red cars for example!

Budget Car Rental:
Much the same procedure as Dollar.

Vehicles get allocated to size of party if booked through a holiday company such as Virgin holidays etc. The thing to remember about US cars the boot/trunk is normally quite small.