How to book cheap car hire

When you hire, cars fit into classes. Classes vary between company, but the smaller and more basic the car, the cheaper it is to hire. In summer, soft-tops or coupes command premiums.

If you're offered an upgrade, compare the features you're getting. A top range compact car may be better than a low-range standard car.

Don't assume lower-range cars are cheapest. Surprisingly, estate cars and people carriers can work out cheaper than smaller cars – it all depends on demand in that country.

Got a preference for a car? If you've used a certain make of car before, let's say a Nissan Leaf, and it's not available cheaply via a broker or comparison site, try going direct. With a little polite nudge, sometimes you can get lucky and get the car you want at the price you want.

To find the very cheapest car hire you should always search via a comparison site. But if you prefer to go with a big-name firm – say because you find it more trustworthy or collect loyalty points – this sneaky loophole can sometimes cut costs, and even beat comparison site prices for that firm too.

This trick mainly works when booking in Europe, although it can occasionally work elsewhere as well. Essentially it involves booking a car with a firm via one of its foreign websites rather than its UK site. Here's the lowdown:

• How does it work? Type the firm's web address into your browser, but replace the ".co.uk" extension with that of another country (for example, Italy's is ".it" – view a full list here). This should take you to the firm's foreign site – then search for the car you want. The price will be in the local currency – check what the equivalent is in pounds (you can use MSE's Travel Money Max tool) to see if it's cheaper than booking via the UK site.

• Who does it work with? When we checked with five major firms – Avis, Budget, Europcar*, Hertz and Sixt* – they all told us it wasn't against their terms and conditions to do this in Europe. So if you have a UK address and driving licence, you can book a car anywhere in Europe using any of those firms' European websites.

  Elsewhere it's more complicated. Avis and Budget don't allow Brits to book cars in the US via their US sites, for example – Sixt does.

• How much can I save? We found you can sometimes make savings this way. But always make sure you're using the right plastic to avoid paying nasty foreign exchange fees on the transaction.

  The trick can occasionally beat comparison sites' best prices for the big-name firms too. In the past, for example, through Kayak we found three days in Milan in August with Budget for £66. On Budget's Italian site, we were quoted £58 (€81) but these savings can be harder to find.

Here's a little inspiration:

You need to request a personal code from the DVLA up to 21 days before picking up a car either in the UK or abroad. This is so hire firms can check for points.

In practice, many firms don't seem to ask for the code at the counter – when we asked 1,700 people in a Twitter poll back in 2016, just 3% had been asked for the code when hiring a car overseas, and 14% in the UK. But it's still wise to get one anyway just to be on the safe side.