Gold Coast Car Rentals

Check out our opposition for yourself

We guarantee to provide the best value rental deals on the Gold Coast.

Our Best Value Guarantee, which has been in force since 2003, is that if you find a comparable “full service” rental deal that is cheaper than our offer, we will reduce our price by double the difference, plus an additional $50!

Anyone can give you a “price”, but you can’t compare prices unless you know the detail of what the price brings to you.

In 2018 we, in conjunction with others, established a series of 32 Standards of Fairness covering all aspects of  car rental contracts, except price. This enabled proper comparison of which is the “better deal” as opposed to the lowest price.

To make it easier for you to check out our opposition for yourself, we have compiled a table of all of the car rental depots that we could find on the Gold Coast. Just click on any rental company's name and you will be taken directly to their website for you to get your own quote. We are confident that you will return to our website and continue on to make an online booking request.

We measured each of these companies against the 32 Standards and in this article, we concentrated on the first four Standards, three of which deal with the Security of personal information provided through a website.

Standard No 1 is the presence of the https:// or padlock prefix for any website or webpage address. This facility has been available for more than a decade, but in 2018, only 43.3% of surveyed companies provided the required security. In 2024, the compliance rate has risen much higher to 91%, but there are still four operators within our survey that fail to meet the Standard.

Standard No 2 is the presence of the recommended enhancement (DNSSEC) to the https:// prefix, adding the additional safety of people not being taken to a fake website when entering financial information. This facility has been in force for about four years, but only Family Car Rentals and two other operators are registered for this additional safety.    

Standard No 3 is the use of Payment Platform Providers or Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council Certification (PCI DSS) displayed on the organisations website. This is a recent development with the purpose of ensuring that any business taking money online should have sufficiently robust protection against misuse of the data supplied.

We have certainty of compliance in respect of eight of the 54 surveyed operators, but the absence of declaration of compliance indicates there may be more, but we don’t know which ones they are.

Standard No 4 is the requirement for operators to provide online quotes which are complete and accurate without requiring the consumer to provide personal details.

You will notice in the table below, a column headed "Https:// Status" with either "Safe" or "UNSAFE" referring to Standard No 1 and the “Online Quote” column shows “NO” far more often than it shows ”YES”.  

In fact only 11 of the 54 surveyed operators actually meet the Standard, of course, we didn’t try to get a quote from the UNSAFE operators. That left 39 operators where there were some constraints in obtaining quotes.

How did we fare?

Late model vehicles ranged in price from $452.00 to $1,048.95 across 37 different websites. Out of the top ten lowest prices, the only quote which fully met the stipulated requirements was the lowest quote at $452.00, which was from Family Car Rentals.

Older model vehicles ranged in price from $343.00 to $836.27 across 7 different websites. Out of all of these websites only Family Car Rentals was fully compliant with the 2^nd lowest price of $361.00.

The Lowest price was non-compliant containing a $300 Excess; No Cover for Premium Roadside Assistance, Accessories, Reversing, Single Vehicle Incidents, or Wheels & Tyres.

The major failures in complying with the stipulated requirements were:-