Avis are rarely competitive price-wise. You could try Auto-Europe who do international car hire where you can pick the car up in Spain and drop it off in Portugal. You probably have to pay more than normal for one-way car hire but it shouldn't be a heck of a lot more. The link for an international hire between countries quote is below.

http://www.auto-europe.co.uk/car.cfm

HTH

You may find that the higher charges reflect the fact you are leaving the car in Portugal. That said the link given above does seem to show a considerable saving on the price you quoted. Although there could be some additional fees chargeable as it is a one way hire. This of course would be flagged if you went to this hire car company for your car.
Good luck in your quest.

Thanks all

i rang auto-europe and they won,t allow one way rental on this route. i find this amazing. surely i am not the first person trying to avail of the cheap flights. the airports are only 2 - 3 hours apart.

Where can i get information/timetable in english for cross border bus/train services for sunday 11th march

thanks again
patsat

Strange. I've just gone through a dummy run of the booking process on their website right up to the point where you confirm payment details for a 4-day hire with pick-up at Seville airport on 11th March and drop-off at Faro airport (have I understood you correctly?) with no problem at all. I even tried putting Albufeira as the drop-off point in case that's what you meant and it seems that isn't a problem either. If you use a website to book a hire car and they confirm the booking and debit your card, then that's a done deal. Few people bother phoning anyway when there is a website they can use to book so it doesn't make sense that you should be told it isn't allowed when their website clearly shows it is. One-way car hire between different countries, especially neighbouring countries, isn't that unusual after all. I really think you have been misinformed unless there is some other factor you haven't mentioned.

This note is on their site at step 4 so i decided to ring them:

I would rather be clear and avoid trouble when i get there

thanks
patsat

Sorry but whatever you intended to post didn't show. Are you saying they told you they won't let you hire a car from Spain to Portugal or is it just that one of their conditions is worrying you too much to hire from them. I can't see anything unusual on step4 - standard insurance T&Cs as far as I can tell. I only ask as a friend of mine is intending to do a similar one-way hire later this year but from Portugal to Spain so they would be interested to know what the problem is as I know that they were looking to book with Auto-Europe. That's how I knew Auto-Europe even did inter-country car hire.

This was the note:

Please Note Additional one-way fees may apply to your rental. If fees apply, we will contact you to advise you of these fees, and will not confirm your rental until you have provided payment information and accepted these fees. If fees do not apply and you have provided payment information, we will confirm your booking and send you a confirmation voucher

i do not understand why it vanished in the post

When i rang them they clearly said they do not do one way rentals between seville and faro

patsat

One-way rentals are always really expensive regardless of whether any border crossings are involved because they normally charge you for not only the cost of the requisite number of days car hire but the cost of reeturning it back to base

So it's perfectly possible that the total cost is arrived at as follows:

4 days car hire plus
Additional insurance premium waiver if insurance requirements are different in Portugal from Spain,
1 days car hire whilst it's being driven back to Seville (in other words they're charging you for the day it's not available to hire out to somebody else),
Cost of petrol for the drive from Faro to Seville,
Wages plus subsistence expenses for the employee who drives it back on your behalf,
1 night's B&B for that employee if it's not possible for them to return home the same day,
Transport costs for said employee to return to base in Faro.

There's probably no legal reason why you can't do a one way trip including a border-crossing but it will be massively inconvenient for a budget mass operator and they'd clearly prefer you not to do it and so are likely to price it at a level that deters people from doing it. What you're wanting to do is the equivalent of flying into Manchester, picking up a hire car there and then driving to Glasgow where you want to drop the car off. A bit of a faff even before we have independence up here in Scotland:-)

I won't bore you with the details as to why we needed to do it but a colleague and I returning from a business trip tried to hire a car at Edinburgh airport late one night with a view to returning it to their Dundee depot first thing the following morning - a distance of around 70 miles. Total hire time would have amounted to less than 12 hours. Total cost they wanted to charge us? A full days hire plus £150 pounds 'one-way' supplement for a drive time of little more than an hour. If we'd have realised in advance, it would have cost us only a maximum of £120 pounds to book a Dundee-based private hire taxi to come down to Edinburgh airport and pick us up! We can only assume that the drop off driver wopuld be returning by taxi!

It might be cheaper to travel from Seville to Albufeira by public transport yourself and pick-up a hire car from a local depot for use whilst you're there. There is regular bus service from Seville to Lagos which stops in Faro - it would take you between 2 and half to 3 hours. Not as convenient as driving yourself but a whole lot cheaper from the sound of it.

SM