Disclosure: I'm the founder of CheapCarRent, an Estonian online car rental marketplace. The numbers below come from our own site's search results, not from an independent survey.
A common travel tip says you can save money by skipping the airport desk and picking up your rental car in town. We wanted to see whether our own search results backed that up.
On 27 October 2026 we looked at what our platform displayed for a 7-day rental from 11 to 18 January 2027, with the car returned where it was collected. We counted only economy-class cars (mini and economy), left out offers that send the customer to another broker's site, and compared the cheapest airport offer with the cheapest offer elsewhere in the same city. Totals include our 17% online fee.
Ten cities had economy offers in both places. In nine of them, the airport was cheaper. In one, Athens, the two were equal (EUR 27.67 for the week). The city option never came out ahead.
| City | Airport, cheapest week (EUR) | Off-airport, cheapest week (EUR) | Difference (EUR) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zagreb | 35.76 | 39.35 | 3.59 |
| Madrid | 109.14 | 138.73 | 29.59 |
| Budapest | 176.54 | 249.91 | 73.37 |
| Vilnius | 88.46 | 221.69 | 133.23 |
| Rome | 102.62 | 286.57 | 183.95 |
| Barcelona | 121.27 | 309.93 | 188.66 |
| Split | 65.52 | 276.41 | 210.89 |
| Riga | 56.99 | 387.25 | 330.26 |
| Tallinn | 121.50 | 489.06 | 367.56 |
The median gap across the ten cities was EUR 158.59 for the week.
Why this might be
"Off-airport" here mostly means a supplier's railway station, port or downtown office (Roma Termini, Barcelona Sants, Tallinn Port, Trogir rather than central Split). Those branches tend to have fewer cars, and fewer cars on offer means less price competition. We didn't test that explanation; it's a guess.
The limits of this snapshot
This is one search on one day, for one January week in low season. Most offers, including nearly all of the cheapest ones, come from a single supplier on our platform. Its prices haven't been independently checked, and its checkout was still marked as pending on our side when we ran the search. Several cities (Helsinki, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Malta, Lisbon, Palma) had no comparable off-airport economy offer, and Berlin, Paris and Dublin returned no offers at all. So this shows what our platform displayed, not how the wider market works.
The takeaway is simple: don't assume town is cheaper. Check both pick-up points for your dates, and compare deposit and fuel policy as well as the price.
You can run the same comparison yourself at cheapcarent.com.
