Travelling with a Rented Car?

~ Posted on Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 7:35 AM ~

We went for a short family trip over the weekend recently and travelled up north in a rented car! Why renting a car when we have our own car?

Reason 1: We are bringing MIL along this time and with 3 adults (and me being 8 months preggy now) and 2 kiddos in a car, it is better to travel in a comfortable and spacious car this time. Of course, we can use our current Sedan car but it will be crampy and tiring (less leg space) and travelling 4-5 hours straight is no fun.

Reason 2: We are looking into buying a family car (MPV) sometime next year with our coming 3rd child so we thought this is the best time to rent an MPV to travel up north and try out the MPV we are planning to buy too!

So after googling around for days, I managed to find an affordable car rental company, Mesra Car Tour & Travels, one that specialises in MPV as well! Woohoo! Thank you God for pointing us to the right direction! I immediately wrote an email inquiring the rental price for an MPV for the dates we are travelling and promptly received a reply from their staff.

The rates offered are good and insurance are covered, I love it! I also like that the rental rates of the vehicle is on a 24 hour basis. Meaning if we collected the car at 9am today and returned it at 9am the next day, it is considered a full day rental rate. Other than this factor, I also like that the delivery charges (for the car to be send to our house and collected from our house) is very low compared to others.

With these plus points on hand, we went ahead and booked an MPV for our trip. The car was delivered right in front our house at 9am sharp on the day we are due to leave for our trip up north. Very punctual and the staff politely explained and guided us the interiors and functionality of the MPV.

Personally, I like this MPV as it is spacious and at first I sat with our 4.5 years old at the last row, leaving our 2 years old girl in her car seat at the middle row with my MIL while hubby enjoyed his solo front driving. I like that we can control the aircond setting for all 3 rows in the MPV and we can put in all our luggages, snacks and swimming stuff at the back boot. Nice!

A few hours into our journey, I received an SMS from the car rental company staff reminding us to adhere to the speed limit and even provided the exact GPS location of our car and the speed we were driving at! Whoaaaa... creepily awesome! I quickly informed hubby to slow down his driving and not to exceed any speed limit! Kudos to the car rental company for being professional and disciplined as well!

We were supposed to return the car by 9pm but we were caught up in a terrible traffic jam halfway (a 4 hours ride turned into a 6 hours ride!!) and I quickly SMSed the staff from the car rental company to ask him how much is it to extend the rental as we most likely will not make it home by 9pm to return the car. Surprisingly, the staff is sooo understanding and replied telling us no need to worry, to take our time.

At 10.30pm, we were still about half an hour journey to our home when the staff called me up and said he will come to collect the car from us tomorrow morning since it is late already. Thank God and I am so happy to say that we did not get charged for returning the car late. Kudos to Mesra Car Tour & Travels! Excellent service! Needless to say, we really do enjoyed our holiday and the journey with our rented car. Wonderful experience!