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How to get a one-way Europcar UK rental for just £1

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This is one of those odd little deals which has been running for a while – for at least five years – but which you won’t know about if you are a new reader, and may well have forgotten about otherwise.

Europcar offers one-way UK car rentals for a flat fee of £1, including basic insurance.  Most are for trips to Heathrow or Gatwick.

This is not a marketing ploy.  The company is trying to save itself money by using you as free labour to get cars back to their original location or to re-allocate vehicles across sites.  Why pay a truck to haul a vehicle across the country when you can find someone willing to pay you £1 for the privilege?!

Europcar £1 UK airport car rentals one-way

How do you book a £1 Europcar car rental?

The Europcar £1 rental page is here (this may not work on mobile).

Availability is obviously not guaranteed but you might be lucky.  A lot of readers have taken advantage of this offer.

Your best chance of finding a deal is if you want to travel TO London, usually to Heathrow.  If I look at Liverpool, for example, there are cars this week to Heathrow, Stansted, Luton and Birmingham.

You need to pay for petrol, of course, so this is not necessarily cheaper than taking the train.  You also need to complete the journey within 24 hours of when you collect the car, and of course you need to get yourself to your nearest Europcar depot in the first place.

That said, I’m sure there are occasions when this could work out nicely.

PS.  My last article on earning miles and points when renting from Europcar is here.

Comments (29)

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

  • Jerrry Butler says:

    What’s the best car available on this offer? and do they accept points on your licence?

  • IslandDweller says:

    @Jerry. You get no choice. You get the car they need moved. I’ve had everything from a Volvo estate loaded with options through to a tiny Corsa

  • Gavin says:

    Did this once and got a Jaguar!

  • Nick says:

    Done this a few times, can work out pretty well. You can even combine if nothing direct available (e.g. the north to BHX, then swap for one to LHR). Just be prepared not to know what car they’re going to give you.

    The weirdest one available I’ve found is Stockport to MAN… a journey of what, 10 miles at best?

  • Nick says:

    The europcar offer is not easy to use. I tried to get a booking to Gatwick this past summer and never got the reservation to go through, even if the page gave availability of a car on the day I was looking for (and around it). It gave a ‘website error’ so I tried contacting europcar help via email, and then via their call centers in three countries. Each time I got a different answer as to the problem (pickup location is closed because of covid-wasn’t true as normal paid bookings were possible, was a temporary issue-persisted from 9 weeks before intended date until three days before, checking every few days, and finally that the online system said there was a car available even if there really wasn’t).

  • Oleksandr Dudko says:

    Did this offer maybe 10 times or more, mostly from my local branch in Milton Keynes to airports. For a family of 4 with luggage works better than a taxi and cheaper. Got all sorts of cars, from corsa to nissan x-trail. A few weeks ago while going to Rhodes for half term got a lovely Toyota corolla hybrid. From Milton Keynes, Luton, Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester seems always available, sometimes Stansted as well which covers most of the airports around.

  • cinereus says:

    The link is broken on both mobile and desktop.

  • IslandDweller says:

    The mini site is very fussy about which browser you use. If it doesn’t appear to work, try a different browser.

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.