Care Hire - LRE - max 700km in 7 days?

[Katie]

Hi,
We are travelling to Longreach soon, but will spending most of our time in Winton. We are hiring a car after we arrive in to Longreach; we'll be there for 7 days. The cars I could hire all had a 700km restriction on them. We should be OK - it's a sedan (no 4WDs available), so no 4WDing or off-roading - and the drive between Winton and Longreach will be the main driving we intend to do.

Is this 100 km/day typical for car hire? There was no option for unlimited kilometres on either the Avia or Budget websites, or through the Qantas website. I normally only hire cars in Europe or the US, so limited kilometres is new to me.

Any comments or suggestions? I was just going to ask about unlimited kms when we collect the car? Maybe get Mr Katie to talk to the person at the car hire desk, because he's charming, and I'm not (except when he's not charming).

 

[VPS]

Quite common to have that restriction in remote areas - think they all do the same

 

[kpc]

Quite common to have that restriction in remote areas - think they all do the same

Yup...just came back from Ayers Rock...hired a car for 4 days....so got 400kms free...but we drove 930kms, and had to pay extra for 530 kms at $0.34 per km:evil::evil:....and petrol was nearly $2 per litre :evil:

 

[travelislife]

The ridiculous thing about these 100km limits is that it is easy to do more than 100kms when hiring a car in the city and the limits don't exist. I had a hire car from the city with work that I was averaging 300-400km in a day doing regional work. They could make it more reasonable in these remote areas and make it 200kms a day. 100km is just crazy.

 

[JohnM]

100 km/day is standard in remote areas. Asking for unlimited will do no good.

Why they choose such a low limit, I do not know. OTOH, I guess if they didn't set some sort of limit, the vehicle could come back with an abnormally high distance travelled.

 

[vetrade]

Yes 100km/day seems to be standard but a few months ago I did book 2 4WDs for Darwin and Kununurra for August through arguscarhire.com in the UK and got a 200km /day limit. Then AirNorth changed our flight times and when I put the pickup and drop off times back a couple of hours the revised booking had cut us back to 100km/day. Still, it might be worth getting an online quote from argus just in case they do offer that 200km/day in some country areas.