How strictly do large car-hire companies in Central Europe enforce the license age condition?

score:6

Accepted answer

First things first: rental companies will check your driving licence for validity before they confirm your rental car. This is to ensure that you are legally allowed to drive. Secondly your age will be checked since there are usually extra fees to be paid by young (< 25 years old) drivers. Having performed these two checks they will know if you qualify as a young driver, and from there computing the validity years of your licence will be a trivial operation. The point being that checking that you have had your licence for longer than X years is not a complicated operation, and fits in perfectly with the normal work-flow of rental companies. Hence your hope that

Perhaps the rental desks don't bother to check the license age

is likely to be false.

On a different note, age and licence validity issues are often insurance-related. For example younger drivers usually pay more for car insurance. There's a chance that the insurance company of the rental agency requires them to declare young drivers and disallows them from renting out to inexperienced drivers ( i.e. those who obtained their licence less than X years ago).

Upvote:12

From my experience: Forget your idea, you will be stopped dead cold at 1.

Because many people here in Germany who have for good reason no driving license (dangerous driving, alcohol) tried to get one abroad and tried to rent cars with it, they will always ask for the license and check it together with the ID (you know, stolen/invalid/fake licenses).

From my experience in Germany: a resounding NO.

More post

Search Posts

Related post