Anyone have experience with multiple car classes? I'm going with my wife and 3 small children, one of whom will be in a car seat. We'll need space for a decent amount of luggage, plus a City Mini. These are the models I got quotes for (listed by price, low to high):
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Any experience as to which is the cheapest I can be comfortable will fit us would be helpful. TIA
Trying to avoid going straight to the most expensive.
Anyway, I did a bunch of googling to find the listed trunk space for most of the cars offered in Israel (in liters or whatever):
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Some of these are a little hard to believe though. Like the Accent (which they sell here too as the smallest sedan) is larger at 465 than my last American midsize sedan ('15 Altima - 436)? Or the Corolla at 450, vs the current American Corolla at 368? Something seems a little off.
I know this is mostly for people requesting quotes and whatnot, but I was hoping for this info when I was booking, so I figure others might be interested too.
To bring the above full circle - we ended up in the station wagon category at an excellent rate through B.D.Da'ehu (rental was with Thrifty).
We got a Kia C'eed Station, which from my research was a good thing, as it was slightly more roomy than the other options in the category. It fit a Britax convertible rear facing in the middle seat, with boosters in the 2 outer seats. It wasn't particularly tight in the back, but buckling the kids in the boosters was annoying - nothing to do with this particular car, just the nature of 3 kids in the back. The trunk ended up being just big enough, with 2 full size rolling suitcases fitting flat next to each other (the long way) and a bunch of small bags, knapsacks, the stroller and my hatbox all piled on top of them. With the car loaded up, I obviously couldn't see out the rearview mirror, but the tech in the car made up for it (back up cam for parking, aftermarket lane detection, etc).
Bonus points for the guy at the return for Thrifty at 6AM who took one look at us with all the luggage and our little kids and just drove us to departures and dropped us off in the rental. Easily the fastest rental car return I've ever experienced. In retrospect, we probably would've been in serious danger of missing our flight if we would've had to go through the normal lengthy process of inspection, transferring luggage, waiting for shuttle to the terminal, etc.
Bottom line, the station wagon category is a great option if you don't need more than 5 seats, but still need a good amount of trunk space.