 a price of £2,484 was given. The company which did the research (Nordvpn, which supplies VPN services) found another big saving on a hire car – this time with Hertz in Cape Town at £529 rather than £945. Other savings it highlighted – on cruises, hotels and holidays – were typically around 10-17 per cent: more modest, though still significant. So what are we to make of this? First, if you did make a booking using a VPN, a certain proportion (perhaps two or three per cent) of the savings are likely to be eaten up by the charges on your debit or debit card, because you will almost certainly be paying in a foreign currency. Second, it is not all about using VPNs. I don't have a VPN, but I did some exploring by simply connecting directly to the website of the country in question – avis.nz rather than avis.co.uk, for example. I couldn't quite replicate the huge saving on the New Zealand hire car mentioned above (the research was done two months ago, and prices will have changed). But it was quite easy to find significant differences. A Toyota Corolla hired from Auckland Airport for two weeks in April next year cost NZ$2,113.98 (£1,061) if I booked on avis.nz, but £1,469 on avis.co.uk. Savings in Europe were more marginal. I also tried an Avis booking at Pisa){kind=link}
New research suggests Britons are being ripped off when booking hire cars and more online – but the reality is more complicated
This week there were some widely reported claims that British holidaymakers were being charged hundreds of pounds more than those from other countries because prices charged by travel websites can be much higher when accessed from an internet server in the UK than one based abroad.
The headline examples were quite remarkable. They were generated by using a VPN, which is a way of routing your online enquiry so that the website you are booking with thinks you are browsing in a different country than the UK. In this way, booking an Avis hire car for two weeks from Auckland Airport was quoted at £1,258 when the website thought the enquiry was coming from New Zealand. But when checked on the Avis UK website (avis.co.uk) a price of £2,484 was given.
The company which did the research (Nordvpn, which supplies VPN services) found another big saving on a hire car – this time with Hertz in Cape Town at £529 rather than £945. Other savings it highlighted – on cruises, hotels and holidays – were typically around 10-17 per cent: more modest, though still significant.
So what are we to make of this? First, if you did make a booking using a VPN, a certain proportion (perhaps two or three per cent) of the savings are likely to be eaten up by the charges on your debit or debit card, because you will almost certainly be paying in a foreign currency.