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Best car hire brokers 2025 - and the worst rated providers
If you book with the right car hire broker, you’ll increase your options, save money and get help to resolve any issues. Our survey of thousands of car hire customers will help you choose
Only one car hire broker has ever been awarded Which? Recommended Provider (WRP) status.
Zest Car Rental will save you money by negotiating bulk rates with providers, including excess reimbursement insurance and, often, an additional driver, in its rates. Crucially, it offers an extra level of assistance if anything goes wrong.
The problem with using smaller car rental firms abroad is that you don’t know if they can be trusted. But Zest vets every firm on its website and monitors ratings weekly. If scores fall, a firm will be put under review before being removed from the site completely if there’s no evidence of improvement.
Zest doesn’t work with Goldcar, for example, the lowest-scoring firm for more than a decade in our survey of the Best and worst car hire companies.
And if a problem arises, Zest’s customer service will help you resolve it, quickly (because the providers won’t ignore Zest like they might a customer), and in English.
AutoEurope also has excellent customer service, and is worth considering. But we’d steer clear of Discovercars – a site with just two stars for its customer service.
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Car hire brokers rated
Only one company met our criteria to be awarded Which? Recommended Provider status.
RECOMMENDED PROVIDER | 90% | £31 | |||||||||
| 80% | £41 | ||||||||||
| 74% | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | |||||||
| 73% | £40 | ||||||||||
| 71% | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | ||||||
| 70% | £46 | ||||||||||
| 64% | n/a | n/a |
Using the table: Star ratings are from one to five, the more the better. 'n/a' indicates we did not receive enough responses to provide a rating. Avg price per day Based on respondents recall of the price paid per day. Clarity of extra charges eg: insurance costs, additional drivers, child seats, satnav etc. Customer score Combination of overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend.
Cheap car rental company brokers
In our survey, we asked respondents to tell us what they recall paying for the car per day. We gained enough data to generate an average price paid per day for four brokers and of these, WRP Zest was the cheapest.
How we research car hire brokers
In March 2024 we asked 2,324 members of Which? Connect and the general public to complete an online survey about their experience of using a car hire company in the past two years.
Only those car hire companies that were top of the table and met our consumer-focused criteria are eligible for Which? Recommended Provider status.
Because we don't run the survey every year, in May 2025, we checked that Zest still met our criteria for WRP status and reconfirmed its status in June 2025.