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Durban • South Africa • hire
We read hire agreements the way a careful driver reads a service book, line by line, and then we tell you where the money actually sits. Most of it is not in the day rate.
Florida Road, Morningside
Durban is a hire city whether anybody planned it that way or not. People fly into King Shaka for a week of meetings in Umhlanga, families land for December and need something with a boot, and a good number of residents keep nothing in the garage at all because a car that sits in salt air for twenty-six days a month is a slow, expensive hobby. All of them end up at a counter signing four pages they have not read.
We are a small group of drivers on the wrong side of fifty who got tired of hearing the same stories at the same braais. A waiver that covered everything except the one panel that got damaged. A cross-border letter requested on the Thursday for a Friday departure at Golela. A refuelling fee of R380 on top of a tank that was almost full. None of that is dishonest on the rental company's part; it is written down. It is just written in the part nobody reads at eleven at night after a flight.
So we read it for people. We charge for the time because free advice gets treated like free advice, and because we take no commission from anybody. The prices on this site are indicative and in rand, and if your question takes fifteen minutes on the telephone we will say so rather than invoice you for an hour.
Paid readings and planning
We read, we telephone, we write you a page of notes. We do not hire you a car, we do not take commission from anybody who does, and we will tell you when your question is a five-minute favour rather than a booking. Prices below are indicative, in rand, and include whatever follow-up telephone call the matter needs.
Two to four people hiring for three or four nights out of Durban, usually the Midlands, the Berg or up the coast.
Somebody who has sold one car and not yet bought the next, or whose own vehicle is in for a long repair.
Family or friends flying in for a fortnight who have not driven on our roads before, or not for a long time.
All prices are indicative only. They are not a quotation, they move with the season and the size of the job, and we will say up front if a matter needs more hours than the figure here assumes.
Open the services pageAll seven, with our own slant
Car hire is our emphasis because Durban is where short-term use actually happens, but the rest of the motoring year gets its space too. Each card goes somewhere on the site, and several of them end up woven into the hire pieces because a borrowed car is still a car you have to live with for a week.
The big halls are mostly up on the Highveld, which means a flight or a long run on the N3 for anyone leaving from here. Our interest is practical: which halls let you sit in the cars without a queue, where the parking costs more than the entry, and whether a show weekend is a sensible excuse to hire something you are considering buying.
Coastal humidity is cruel to chrome and crueller to interiors, so the cars that come out for a lawn display in KwaZulu-Natal have usually been fought for. We write about what judging looks for, why an honest unrestored cabin often beats a shiny one, and how owners move a show car without putting kilometres on it.
From Florida Road you can be on the Midlands Meander in ninety minutes, in the northern Berg in three and a half hours, and at Kosi Bay in six if the trucks behave. We plan hires around that: where to refuel before a quiet stretch, which passes deserve a daylight start, and what a gravel clause does to a Berg itinerary.
We drive the expensive ones when a dealer or an owner lets us, and we write about them from the passenger side as much as the driver's. Does the rear seat actually take two adults for four hours. Where does the road noise sit at 120 on a coarse-chip surface. Is the boot a real boot or a styling exercise.
Comfort at our age is a short list of boring things: a driver's seat with real support under the thighs, seat height you can set low enough to see out of, aircon that copes with Durban in February, visibility over your shoulder in a parking garage, and a ride that does not punish you over the patched sections north of Mooi River. Power comes a long way down.
The core of the site. Collection points, excess and waivers, deposits and card holds, fuel policy, kilometre caps, cross-border letters, tracker conditions, after-hours returns and the fees that arrive by post a fortnight later. Six long pieces, plus everything on the services page.
Hiring is also the best test drive money can buy. A week in something on a Durban commute, with your own shopping in the boot and your own mother-in-law in the back, will tell you more than any twenty-minute loop from a dealership. We help people turn a hire into a proper trial before they commit.
The main hub
Six pieces, all longer than they need to be, on the part of motoring that Durban does more than anywhere else in the country. Collection points, the excess, cross-border paperwork, fuel and tolls, what to actually book for a weekend, and the handover that decides everything else.
All six pieces
Airport collection is convenient and it is never free. City collection is cheaper and costs you a trip to the counter. The right answer depends less on money than on what you are doing in the first hour after you get the keys.
Everybody compares day rates because day rates are what the booking sites show. The number that decides whether a hire was cheap or ruinous is the excess, and it is usually three screens deep.
A hired car does not belong to you, which is why a border official wants paper proving you may have it there. Getting that paper is routine, and it is routine only if you start a week early.
Three clauses decide the running cost of a hire: how you return the tank, how many kilometres you may do, and how much the road itself charges. None of them is on the first page of the quote.
The counter will try to sell you an upgrade. Sometimes the upgrade is the right call and sometimes it is a bigger car with worse aircon. Here is how we choose for the routes people actually drive from here.
A quarter of an hour at collection is the best value in the whole transaction. Everything that goes wrong later is decided by what you recorded, or failed to record, in the parking bay.
Three things we keep repeating
A hire at R640 a day with a R25 000 excess is a more expensive week than one at R790 with R3 500, the moment a trolley touches a door in the Gateway parking. Compare the exposure first and the daily figure second.
A cross-border letter for Eswatini or Lesotho is not printed at the counter while you wait. Allow a working week, longer in December, and expect a fee of somewhere around R500 to R900 plus the border charges themselves.
The single cheapest insurance in the whole process is your own telephone camera, used slowly, in daylight, before you drive off. We talk people through it more often than we talk about cars.
Pictures from around here
Photographs from hires, shows and weekends in and around the city. Nothing staged in a studio, and nothing shot anywhere we have not actually been.
The thing we say most often
Every optional waiver on the counter's list costs between R60 and R400 a day. The one piece of protection that costs nothing is two minutes of photographs in the collection bay, taken in the same order every time, with the odometer and fuel gauge readable and the light behind you. We have watched that single habit settle charges of R4 000, R6 400 and once R11 200 without a single raised voice.
It works because a damage claim is an argument about when a mark appeared, and an argument about time is won by whoever has the timestamp. The hire company has a line drawing with ticks on it. You have twenty frames with metadata. That is not a close contest, and the companies know it, which is why the matter usually ends in one reply.
Asked on the telephone every week
For payment, usually yes. For the security hold, often no, and that is the one that stops you driving away. Policy varies by company and sometimes by branch, so get it confirmed in writing when you book and take a second card if you have one. The card must also be in the name of the driver on the agreement, which catches out couples who book on one card and send the other person to collect.
Commonly R3 500 to R8 000 on a standard car, and up to R15 000 on something large or where you kept the full excess. It is a hold rather than a charge, but you cannot spend it, and release after return usually takes seven to twenty-one working days. If you are travelling on a card with a modest limit, that hold can quietly ruin a restaurant bill in week two.
On a hire of three days or more in and around Durban, in our opinion yes, almost always. The middle tier at R120 to R220 a day typically brings your exposure from twenty-odd thousand down to the R3 000 to R6 000 band, which is the difference between an irritating week and a serious one. Read its exclusions first, because tyres, glass and the undercarriage are usually carved out.
Yes, for any hired vehicle leaving South Africa. Request it when you book, allow five working days and longer in December, expect a fee around R500 to R900, and check the registration number on the letter matches the car you are actually given. Carry rand in small notes for the road use charge and the third-party insurance sold at the post.
Gravel depends entirely on the agreement, and many standard contracts exclude unproclaimed roads in a way that voids cover rather than merely reducing it. Sani Pass above the border post is a 4x4 route and no standard hire car is permitted on it. The tracker in the car records where you went, so this is not a clause you can quietly ignore.
Most branches and the airport have a key box or designated return lanes, and the drop is allowed. The risk is that nobody inspects the car while you are there, so do the full photograph sequence in the bay, include the surroundings and the key going into the box, note the time, and keep it all until the final statement has cleared. If an attendant is there, ask for a signed return slip even if they say it is unnecessary.
Write rather than telephone. Quote the agreement number and the return date, ask for the damage assessment, the repair quotation and the photographs the claim rests on, and attach your own dated return sequence. Most of these are sloppiness rather than dishonesty, and evidence resolves sloppiness fast. If it does not move and the amount is serious, the consumer protection route is available and the company is aware of that.
It is the best money you can spend before a purchase. A week in the class you are considering, doing your own commute up the hill, with your own shopping in the boot and your own passengers in the back, tells you things a dealership loop cannot. Pay attention to how the seat feels after two hours, the over-the-shoulder visibility in a parking garage, and whether the aircon copes with February. Then decide.
A hire agreement takes us twenty minutes to read and can take you a year to argue about. Telephone the Florida Road number or fill in the form, tell us the dates and the route, and we will tell you what the week will really cost.