We’ve hired cars no less than 15 times across Europe in places such as Germany, Portugal, Spain, Rhodes and Cyprus, and each time the trip has hinged on getting that one bit right.

A family road trip in our own vehicle is a completely different creature. We can throw in whatever we like, stop when we like, and fill the boot with food to keep costs down.

Fly somewhere and pick up a hire car instead, and you’re working with tighter margins on space, time and patience, usually after an early start and a flight with two kids who are done with sitting still.

The good news is that car hire abroad sounds far more daunting than it is, and the driving itself is rarely the hard part. The planning around it is where trips get won or lost, and after enough airport desks, tiny village streets and wrong turns, we’ve settled into a way of doing it that works.

Why we hire a car instead of relying on public transport

We’ve never tried to do a family holiday abroad purely on trains and buses, and honestly, that’s a choice rather than an accident. The places we like staying aren’t the places public transport goes.

Salema is a good example. We’ve been twice, once flying out for a week and once passing through on a road trip in our own vehicle, and it’s a quiet fishing village at the western end of the Algarve rather than the busy resort end.

Without a car you’re stuck in one spot. With one, you can make the most of exploring the area and reach more coastal walks, the headlands and the smaller beaches that make that stretch worth the trip in the first place.If you want a feel for it, I’ve written about whether Salema is worth visiting in more detail.

The same logic applied on our family holiday in Polis and the Akamas in Cyprus, where the walks and coves along that stretch of coast are simply not reachable any other way.

Having a car allows you to explore at your own family’s schedule and reach places that might be out of reach of public transport.

It was the same on our family holiday in Rhodes, where the beaches and villages we wanted to see were spread right across the island.

The same has been true visiting family in Portugal. We’ve stayed in Castelo Branco and in Fundão, both inland and both nowhere near a convenient airport, and a hire car each time was the only sensible option.

We also visited family another time high up in the Andalusian mountains in Spain, staying in a secluded Airbnb off a campo road. That whole trip was only possible with car hire as our transport.

Book your car hire before you fly, not when you land

Sorting your car hire at Faro Airport or wherever you’re flying into before you leave home saves you money and a fair bit of stress.

Walk-up rates are worse, choice is thinner, and you’re negotiating after a flight when you’ve got nothing left in the tank. It’s the easiest of all the ways to save money when hiring a car, and it costs you nothing but a bit of forward planning.

Booking ahead also gives you time to read what you’re actually agreeing to. We only ever look for full to full with unlimited mileage.

We don’t want to panic about being charged for extra miles or spend the holiday tracking how far we’ve driven. And if the hire company fills the tank for you, they charge a premium, way more than even the closest fuel station to the airport.

So before we hand the car back, we look that station up in advance and fill up there, rather than doing frantic laps of a ring road with a flight to catch.

One thing worth saying plainly. We’ve learned to stick with the bigger names.

We’ve had good experiences with Europcar and Sixt, and the couple of times we went with a cheaper unknown company to save a few pounds, we regretted it. Long waits, tired cars, and staff whose entire focus was selling us things we didn’t need.

The larger companies cost a bit more, but the cars have been clean and decent, the desks have been friendlier, and the whole thing takes half the time. For a week’s holiday, that difference is worth paying for.

The insurance upsell, and how to handle it

This is the bit that catches people out, and it’s the only part of hiring a car abroad that genuinely annoys me.

We always sort our excess cover before we travel, sometimes as an annual policy, because buying it at the desk costs a fortune by comparison. What varies wildly is how the desk reacts.

The best experience we’ve had was in Cyprus, where the agent said something like: I can see you’ve already got cover, I have to tell you about ours because it’s my job, but you obviously don’t need it.

That’s it. Box ticked, no pressure, on your way. Others have simply asked if we had cover and left it there, which is equally fine.

The worst is when someone tries to convince you your policy isn’t suitable. We’ve hired enough cars to know exactly what we’re covered for, so it washes over us, but plenty of people must get talked into hundreds of pounds of cover they already have.

If you want to understand exactly what you’re being sold, it’s worth reading up on the difference between collision damage waiver and excess insurance before you go, because that’s the confusion the upsell relies on.

What I’ve never understood is why hire companies don’t price their own cover somewhere near the third party rate. Most of us would just add it on for convenience if they did. Instead they charge multiples of it, and everyone with any sense books elsewhere.

Sorting drivers, seats and the small extras

Only my husband drives when we hire abroad. He’s more confident on the other side of the road, and adding a second driver is nearly always a paid extra, so for a week or less it isn’t worth it.

I did all my own driving on trips to the USA before we met, eight weeks’ worth in total, and I’d happily drive in Europe, but the maths on that add on fee has never worked out in our favour. That’s my job as navigator settled, then.

Portugal in particular is a joy to drive in. The roads are quiet, the motorways are calm, and you can cover proper distances without the grind you’d get at home.

The exception is the traditional villages, where the lanes were never built for cars and you can find yourself reversing back out of something with a wall on either side. I’ve been in that car. It’s memorable.

One thing we hadn’t come across until Cyprus is the DVLA check code. You generate it free on the gov.uk view or share your driving licence page, and it lets a hire company look up your driving record, including any penalty points.

We printed ours out before we flew and nobody asked for it. In fact we’ve never been asked for it, in Cyprus or anywhere since.

I’d still get one, though. It’s free and takes a minute, and it would be a miserable way to start a holiday if a company did insist and we couldn’t produce it.

The only catch is timing. The code runs out after 21 days and is generally single use, so it’s worth generating it a day or two before you travel rather than weeks ahead when you’re feeling organised.

Cyprus was the easiest of the lot, purely because they drive on the same side as we do. Nothing to adjust to at all, which takes a surprising amount of low-level tension out of the first day.

When ours were smaller, we took our own booster and car seats out as oversized luggage rather than hiring them, because the airline fee was cheaper than a daily rate for the whole trip.

At 11 and 14 that’s behind us now, and it’s made travel noticeably lighter. It’s one of the quiet perks of the kids growing up.

Boot space and packing for a hire car

Boot space is the thing people underestimate. When we’re flying with luggage we’ve got four suitcases and four backpacks between us, so we book a car that can genuinely swallow that rather than one that can technically manage it if nobody wants to see out of the back window.

The exception was a budget Ryanair trip where we travelled with backpacks only to avoid hold luggage fees. The car we ended up with was tiny, barely a five seater, and it didn’t matter in the slightest because we had nothing to put in the boot.

That’s the trade to weigh up. Pack light and you can book small and cheap. Take suitcases and you need to pay for the space or spend the week wedged in.

If you’re curious how far the light packing approach can go, our Ryanair underseat bag packing list covers a full week for four of us.

Navigation, food stops and the first few hours

Two lessons here, both learned the hard way.

Don’t trust the in-car satnav blindly. We did exactly that once and it confidently delivered us to the wrong place over an hour away, with no phone signal and an Airbnb host waiting for us.

Now we look up directions before we travel and set them on a phone at the hire desk, while we’ve still got wifi or decent signal, rather than trying to sort it out on the road in the middle of nowhere.

The other is food. In our own car, like on our 13 day Europe family road trip, we carry everything, but flying you can’t, and there’s no telling how long the day will run.

Delayed flight, queue at the hire desk, wrong turn, and suddenly it’s late and you’re two hours from anywhere. So we buy meal deals and snacks at the airport before we set off and keep them in the backpacks.

It sounds excessive until you arrive somewhere small on a Sunday and find every shop closed, which has happened to us more than once. Being vegan sharpens that instinct, since the roadside options in rural Spain and Portugal can be thin at the best of times.

What we always pack for a hire car trip

None of this is exciting, but these are the three things that have saved us the most hassle at the other end:

• A phone holder that clips to an air vent, so we can use phone maps properly
• Our own excess insurance details, printed or saved offline
• Food and drink bought before we set off, enough to get us to wherever we’re staying, and even as a meal for when we get there if all the shops are closed

That first stretch from the airport to wherever you’re staying sets the mood for the whole week. Get the car sorted properly and it’s just a nice drive with the windows down.

Get it wrong and you’re three hours into your holiday, hungry, lost, and arguing about a satnav.

Plan the boring bits before you fly, and the rest of it mostly takes care of itself.