Car Rental in Turkey- Things you need to know

Car Rental in Turkey – Things you Need to know 

Rental cars can be very cheap in Turkey and can cost as little as $18 a day, depending on when you
book it and with which company. However, although the cheaper prices will be very tempting for those
budget travelers out there, I really recommend you do a quick google search for the rental car company that you want to use and read the reviews thoroughly.
Many reviews for the cheaper car companies are negative and are filled with complaints such as their deposit never being refunded or other sorts of headache problems. We ended up finding a good car company which costs slightly higher at $21 a day, but it was worth it to go with a more reputable company with all positive reviews and it left us with more of a peace of mind.

The Young Globetrotters

Photograph by Dani De Leo

Tolls are expensive

The tolls that you accumulate when traveling around Turkey are very costly and took us by surprise on the last day of our trip when we returned the rental car and owed a whopping $96 worth of toll money to the rental
company.
We made them print out the toll records for us to add up and count ourselves because we were so shocked and in denial that it could have added up to be this much after only renting the car for 9 days. This is big a surprise cost that you need to budget in and consider before deciding to rent a car.

Manuals are a lot more expensive than Automatics

Unfortunately, I cannot drive a manual car, only an automatic, but luckily my boyfriend knows how to so we ended up renting a manual car. Automatics are by far the cheaper options available, but of course renting a manual is still possible, just at a costlier price. Make sure you are confident with knowing how to use a manual car, as driving in a foreign country is already nerve wrecking at times

Get a car that takes diesel instead of petrol

We were advised multiple times to get a car that accepts diesel rather than petrol. Diesel is
cheaper than petrol in Turkey (at least as of the time I am writing this article) and you also can get better gas mileage.

We rented a Peugeot car and were able to get approximately 700-800
kilometers in on a full tank, depending on the kind of roads we were driving on

It is hard to get a car outside of the airport

There are two main airports in Istanbul, IST and SAW. Both of these airports have dozens of car rental agencies inside where you can easily pick up your car after your flight.
However, if you are trying to rent a car from within the city of Istanbul and not at one of the airports, there are very limited options.
Almost every car that was in our price range that we could find had to either be picked up at IST or SAW.

This was very inconvenient for us as we were already staying in the city center on the European side of Istanbul and had to take a taxi all the way to IST airport (more than an hour drive since Istanbul traffic is always heavily congested) just to pick up the rental car. Then we had to drive all the way back and back track our same journey to continue on to our first road trip stop, which was Izmir.

It would be a lot more convent if you are able to rent the car directly when you land at the airport in Istanbul so you can save the time and money of having to return all the way to the airport just to get a car. However, I do not really recommend spending too much time driving in Istanbul itself as the traffic is awful

Book in Advance

It is smart to book it advance before you arrive in Turkey so that you get the best deals and have a car waiting for you once you landed. We thought that we could just get a car on the spot once we landed, which may be possible, but not when you land at 11pm and are then scrambling from one car rental agency to another trying to find an open shop.
We ended up being defeated as the only few agencies that were still open had cars out of our budget. We ended up taking a taxi into the city center to our hostel and then having to go back to the airport two days later just to get a car… not the best travel planning

Try to return the car to the airport that you are flying from

we landed and flew out of SAW airport while in Turkey. It is located on the Asian side of Istanbul and about 45-60 minutes from the city center.
Unfortunately, the cheapest car we could find that had good reviews was to be picked up from IST airport and we also had to drop it back off at IST even though we were flying from SAW, unless we wanted to pay a 20-euro fee. If we had booked and planned ahead, we could have gotten a car directly from SAW for the same price or used a company with a flexible drop off location.

For your own conscience and for saving both money and time, make sure to rent a car that you can just off at the airport you are flying from

It is okay to drive at night

We were nervous at first about driving at night around Turkey because you never know how safe or unsafe the roads of a foreign country are at night, especially if it is your first time driving there. Luckily, many locals we met told us that it is completely safe and that we had nothing to worry about, which ended up to be true and we never ran into any issues. We ended up doing many of our long drives such as to Cappadocia and Istanbul during the late afternoon and night so that we did not waste precious daylight hours just driving. Turkey is a large country to road trip around so you would be surprised by how far some of the major tourist destinations are from each other

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