As the winter weather finally starts to show signs of receding, I wanted to take a few minutes to remind you about some of the special deals and offers our van hire partners National and Europcar are currently providing.

National Van Rental

• Free Additional Driver on all van rentals
• GPS units for hire at selected branches

National’s ‘Free Additional Driver’ special offer is currently in full swing. It’s a great deal, allowing you to have a second driver on every van rental for no additional charge.

An additional driver usually costs £7.27 per day when hiring a van from National, so this really is a money saver on top of their already competitive rates.

National are also one of the first major car and van hire companies in the UK to introduce the option of hiring a GPS (satellite navigation) unit with your car or van. At present, GPS units are only available for hire from National’s Heathrow, Gatwick, Oxford, Kings Cross and Marble Arch branches.

Europcar

• Great rates on one-way van hire
• Discounted mid-week van hire
• Hourly van hire

Europcar is one of Europe’s largest car and van hire companies, with a fleet of 6,000 vans in the UK alone. It is also still the only major van hire company in the UK to offer van hire by the hour.

Hourly van hire can work out really well if you only need a van for an hour or two – to collect some furniture, for example – saving you the cost and hassle of having to do a daily rental.

Europcar also currently have a fantastic mid-week van hire deal – with daily rates starting from just £22.50 a day from selected locations

(Currently available at Aberdeen City, Aberdeen Airport, Carlise, Dundee City, Edinburgh City, Edinburgh Airport, Glasgow Gity, Glasgow Airport, Inverness City, Inverness Airport, Teeside Airport, Newcastle Airport).

To book hourly van hire or mid-week van hire, visit Europcar’s website now.

Any mention of Europcar wouldn’t be complete without discussing their superb one-way van hire deal. The truth is that although one-way van hire is extremely useful for renters, it’s an expensive pain in the neck for van rental companies – who end up with their hire vans in all the wrong places!

That’s why most companies charge a huge extra fee for one-way hire – often £200+.

Europcar, on the other hand, have managed to put together a special deal that lets you have one-way van hire for an extra charge of just £24.99.

There are some conditions – the rental must be between 8am Monday and 4pm Thursday, it only applies to panel vans (not Lutons) and I’m not sure whether it’s available between all rental branches.

However, it’s still a great offer – if you need one-way van hire, it’s well worth getting a quote from Europcar to see whether you are eligible for this deal.

Europcar is introducing a scheme later this year that will allow rental customers to offset the carbon emissions caused by their rental.

The scheme will be voluntary and the rental giant – who handle more than 10 million rentals each year across Europe – expect around 5% of customers to opt in. Customers will have to pay for the service, although charges have not yet been announced.

Europcar Group’s chief executive officer, Salvatore Catania, said that the scheme “will be rolled out to all countries” and “is not a marketing tool, it is part of a 10 year commitment we have shown to the environment.”

It’s been a busy week here at vanrental.co.uk Towers – we’ve been adding new van hire branches and locations until they’ve come out of our ears…

We’re very pleased to be able to announce that we have now added all of Europcar UK’s van hire locations to our database, complete with links directly to Europcar UK’s online booking engine.

This means that as well as 116 new branches – giving you more choice all over the UK – we now have van hire branches listed in 29 new locations – including lots of new airport van hire locations:

Aberystwyth
Belfast City Airport
Birmingham International Airport
Blackpool
Blackpool International Airport
Chorley
Colwyn Bay
Coventry Airport
Derry
Derry City Airport
Doncaster Robin Hood Airport
Droitwich
Durham Tees Valley Airport
East Midlands Airport
Falmouth
Fishguard
Guernsey Airport
Humberside Airport
Isle of Wight
Jersey Airport
London New Malden
London Woodford Green
Newquay Cornwall Airport
Norwich International Airport
Penzance
Southport
Stamford
Truro
Weymouth

Europcar are one of the best-known car and van hire brands in Europe and together with their partner company National Van Rental have a combined fleet of more than 6,000 vans in the UK.

Europcar offer four types of van for hire (click on the links for sizes and pictures):

• Small Vans – Renault Kangoo or similar
• Short Wheelbase Panel Vans - usually a Volkswagen Transporter T28 (equivalent to Ford Transit SWB)
• Long Wheelbase Vans – usually a LDV Maxus (equivalent to Ford Transit LWB)
• Luton Vans – ideal for DIY house removals, these are usually LDV Maxus Luton box vans

Europcar offer an exceptionally flexible and competitive van hire service, allowing one-way hire throughout the UK at extremely competitive rates – their one-way surcharge for prepaid bookings is much lower than any other company we know of.

Europcar also offers hourly van hire and has regular special offers on van hire – such as discounted mid-week van hire.

Finally, for anyone needing a to hire a van for longer periods – over a month – Europcar offers Month+ Van Hire. It’s the perfect compromise between short-term rental and leasing a van, with the choice of 1 month or 3 month commitments – and the guarantee of a nearly new, hassle-free van.

To learn more about Europcar UK Van Hire or check out their current special offers, just click here.

In a move that should result in much greater availability of rental vans for both Europcar and National Van Rental customers, Europcar UK and National Car Rental are pooling their rental fleets, allowing customers of either brand to hire vans from both fleets.

The changes mean that from early March, Europcar and National will offer a combined rental van fleet of more than 6,000 vans from over 250 locations across the UK. The rental car fleets of the two companies have also been combined, resulting in a combined UK fleet of over 60,000 vehicles.

Europcar UK Group’s Fleet Director Tim Bailey stressed that “The importance of vehicle availability should not be underestimated in the current marketplace.”

Both the Europcar and National brands are owned in the UK by Europcar UK Group, so the rationalisation appears to make good business sense and should also offer noticeable benefits for customers, giving a wider choice of vehicles at all locations.

Airports are often busy, tiring places – especially at the end of a flight, when all you want to do is get on your way.

It looks like Europcar understand this and are doing their best to ease the pain. Europcar’s new Airside check-in system enables passengers travelling from Gatwick and Edinburgh into many of the UK’s major airports to have their rental car reservations processed automatically – before they arrive.

According to Europcar Operations Director David Alexander, “customers can check-in their car for rental before they board the plane, safe in the knowledge that the rental agreement will be pre-printed and the vehicle will be allocated before they even take off.”

All that remains to be done on arrival is to sign the rental agreement, pickup the keys and drive off. Sounds good to me.

Most rental websites (except this one!) require you to choose your dates, vehicle type and location at the beginning of the booking process – without allowing you to see the location’s exact address.

This can be a bit of a headache in larger towns and cities, as you can end up having to trek some distance across town to pick up your vehicle.

To help address this problem, we allow people to choose a location first and then see a list of van hire branches and their addresses before proceeding any further. We also provide popup maps for every hire branch in our database – so you can see exactly where it is.

Europcar have now also introduced a similar feature to their website – the location finder.

Simply choose a town name from the drop down list (rather like this site). You can then see full address details for the branch at that location and a map of its exact position (of course, with our system, you gain access to all this information for four rental companies – not just one!).

Take a look at the UK version of Europcar’s van rental location finder here.

Europcar is to roll out a thumbprint identification scheme to all of its 130 UK branches. Vehicle theft is a major problem for rental companies and the scheme is intended to discourage potential theives.

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Europcar are the first van hire company in the UK to allow you to rent vans by the hour. The service is available from all Europcars UK offices, for rental periods of up to 8 hours.

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It looks like Sixt and Europcar have been competing to see who can produce the most impressive-looking hire booth. Unfortunately for UK van renters these pictures were taken at Hamburg airport – but here’s hoping that these designs make their way to our shores in the future.

See here for a full set of images.

Original story here.