Car Hire Florence

fipo79

New member
Hi Everyone!
What a great forum and source of information.

I am wondering if anyone can recommend a good car rental place in Florence.
We intend to rent a car when we are leaving Florence to head south and explore Tuscany.
We want to drop the car back before getting the train onto Pisa 5 days later.
We are staying near the Mercato Centrale not too far from the main train station.
We are looking for a reasonable rental place that will help us negotiate the ZTL without getting fined.

Any help would be amazing

Thanking you
F
 
Ztl

Buongiorno,

You should be able to get around the ZTL zones by letting the hotel (as long as the hotel is located INSIDE the ZTL zones) know you are driving a car and they will communicate that info to the local authorities so when you come in and out it knows NOT to consider your car. You need to tell them everytime you come inside the zone - and they will need the license plate number.

As for dropping off your car - why don't you just drop in in Pisa instead of taking the train over to the airport? direct and easy (the Pisa Airport is a pretty easy drop off.)

Buon Viaggio,

Donna Denise
 
Thank you very much for your reply!
We are renting an apartment in Florence.
So will need the car once leaving the ZTL zone. And once reinterring if we go back to Florence to drop car.

We thought about driving to Pisa and dropping the car back there. But the companies I checked charged E80-E100 extra to drop back to different place than pick up?

Can anybody recommend and reasonable car rental places in Florence?!!

Thank you very very much!
 
I would suggest you take a look at this article:
http://www.visitflorence.com/florence-car-rental/
and use the search box to see what companies come up.

Since you're in an apartment rental, the ONLY way for you to come and in and out during your entire stay is if you park your car at a private garage within the ZTL. They, like the hotels, will communicate your license plate to the authorities so you are not fined. This is if you keep the car for more than a day while in Florence.

But since you plan to rent once you leave Florence and only return to drop off the car, then the car rental agency will also communicate the license plate to authorities upon return. Just make sure to ask them when you rent whether they are inside the ZTL or not and whether there is a specific route to follow out and in back to them. Some are borderline on the ZTL boundary and you might not need to enter the ZTL at all to get to them, but if you take wrong turns to get to them, they might not know this and not communicate the license plate to the authorities. It is not a problem generally, all of the rental agencies in the center near the station do business fairly and deal with this on a daily basis.

The most important part is you already know there is such a thing as a ZTL! Make note that many towns have them in what are the historical centers. Lots of people decide to drive and never ever even know what a ZTL is or that it even exists and then are confused by the fines months after they get home.

The ZTLs normally embrace the OLD, historic part of the medieval towns. So as long as you expect them, follow the P signs for parking lots (which are always outside of the ZTL areas), then you should be fine driving in Tuscany and avoiding entering any restricted traffic areas ;-)
 
Return at Rental agencies in ZTL vs Return at Airport

We are also staying at an apartment rental in Florence, so don't have a way to get our license plate reported ahead of time through a hotel. We are driving to Florence with a car we will have picked up elsewhere, and dropping it off at the Florence office of the rental agency when we arrive. Since we will not have originated our rental in Florence, how will we get our license plate number to the correct authorities before we are already in the city? I have looked at reviews of the main car rental businesses in the Borgo Ognissanti area on Google maps-- and there were so many complaints that people got fines for driving into this area, and found the streets confusing and the drop off locations hard to find, causing them to use up lots of gas after they had just filled the tank for return. Communication with customers appears to be insufficient to help them navigate this area. Some complained of very long, slow-moving lines at pretty much all the agencies. It has frightened my husband and I into thinking we should drop off our rental at the Florence airport instead. It seems it will add a lot of time to our arrival logistics, though.
Can you provide advice or a safe route to the rental agencies that explains how to avoid the ZTL? Or how to be sure your license plate has been correctly reported? We are currently reserved with Hertz. It seems it should not be hard for the agencies to produce a map that clearly marks the route to take for return.
 
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