Holiday Autos Car Hire Review

Rates and terms checked 14 November 2026 · Holiday Car Hire · Compare100 editorial team

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Holiday Autos searches 550 car rental suppliers across more than 50,000 locations, and the single figure a holiday renter needs from it is £2,500 — the most its own Premium Insurance will pay back if a hire company keeps your excess after a scrape. It is one of the oldest names in leisure car hire, and the quote engine behind it belongs to CarTrawler, which Expedia Group agreed to buy on 20 May 2026.

What the brand does genuinely well is paperwork. Plenty of car hire brokers publish nothing at all about the excess product they sell at the last click; CarTrawler serves a full Insurance Product Information Document for Premium Insurance, names the insurer, and sets out thirteen separate reimbursement limits line by line — £650 for glass, £450 for keys, £400 for the undercarriage, £250 for misfuelling, £150 to replace a tyre and £40 to repair one. When Which? priced nine broker excess policies in March 2026, Holiday Autos came out the cheapest of the nine.

Two things are worth knowing before you book. The contract for the car is not with Holiday Autos: the booking conditions say your contract is with the rental supplier, and they are governed by Irish law. And Premium Insurance is a refund, not a waiver — the deposit still leaves your own credit card at the desk, and the policy covers you worldwide except the United States and eleven other named countries, so a family hiring in Florida cannot buy it at all.

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Who takes the booking	Etrawler Unlimited Company, trading as CarTrawler, Irish company 93433, Classon House, Dundrum Business Park, Dublin 14
UK group company	Etrawler UK Limited, company 08565121, incorporated 11 June 2013, 5th Floor 20 Fenchurch Street, London EC3M 3BY, SIC 82990
Who you contract with for the car	The rental supplier — CarTrawler states it does not own or operate any transportation
Excess refunded by Premium Insurance	Up to £2,500 per rental, against a typical supplier excess of £200 to £2,500
Insurer behind Premium Insurance	Inter Partner Assistance S.A., part of the AXA Group, Brussels, UK branch 106-118 Station Road, Redhill RH1 1PR, firm reference 202664
Glass, roof and undercarriage limits	£650 windscreen, windows or sunroof, £500 roof, £400 undercarriage
Tyres	£150 to replace, £40 to repair or for a flat
Other limits	£450 keys, £250 each for misfuelling, personal possessions, roadside assistance and loss of use, £100 administration charges, £50 out-of-hours collection, £50 travel expenses
Eligibility	UK permanent residents only, named on the rental agreement, vehicles up to 9 seats, rentals up to 62 days
Where cover does not apply	The USA, plus Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, North Korea, Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe
Which? policy score	51% across 21 rated policy elements, the cheapest of nine broker policies at £30.46 for a week in Spain, published 29 April 2026
Governing law	The laws of Ireland, with liability limited to the amount paid for the transportation
Platform scale	550+ car rental suppliers, 500+ mobility suppliers, 300+ travel brands including more than 70 airlines, 50,000+ locations

Three companies stand between you and the car

The booking conditions you accept on holidayautos.com are CarTrawler's. They name Etrawler Unlimited Company, an Irish company registered under number 93433 with its office at Classon House, Dundrum Business Park, Dublin 14, and they say in terms that CarTrawler facilitates bookings by introducing you to transportation suppliers and that it does not own or operate any Transportation and is not a Transportation Supplier. Your contract for the car itself is with whoever hands over the keys — Hertz, Europcar, Sixt, Enterprise, Goldcar, Green Motion or any of the other suppliers on the platform.

There is a British company in the group, and it is not the one you deal with. Etrawler UK Limited, company 08565121, was incorporated on 11 June 2013 and is active at 5th Floor, 20 Fenchurch Street, London EC3M 3BY. Its registered activity is SIC 82990, “other business support service activities not elsewhere classified” — a back-office code on a company sitting behind a consumer travel brand. It files full accounts, 27 pages, most recently made up to 30 September 2025 and filed on 14 March 2026, and on 2 October 2026 it extended its accounting period to 31 December 2026.

So a renter in Manchester books through a British brand, with a British group company a mile from the Bank of England, under the laws of Ireland, from an Irish unlimited company, for a car supplied by a third firm. None of that is improper and none of it is hidden; it does decide which court hears a dispute, and it is why the liability clause matters: CarTrawler's own wording limits what it owes you to the amount paid by you for the Transportation.

Premium Insurance pays you back; it does not stop the charge

This is the part most readers come for, and the mechanism is the whole story. Premium Insurance is sold as Damage Refund, and the product information document describes it as insurance that protects the amount you will be liable to pay under the hire agreement. In practice that means the rental company still takes the money. The document is explicit that deposits must be held on a credit card with an appropriate limit, so a renter with a £1,000 limit and a £2,500 excess has a problem the policy cannot solve.

Once you have paid, the limits are generous for a broker policy and worth setting out in full: £2,500 for the excess retained after damage or theft, £650 for windscreen, window or sunroof glass, £500 for the roof, £450 for hire vehicle keys, £400 for the undercarriage, £250 each for misfuelling, personal possessions, roadside assistance and towing, and loss of use, £150 to replace a tyre and £40 to repair one or deal with a flat, £100 for the hire company's administration charges, £50 for an out-of-hours collection caused by a delayed flight and £50 of travel expenses. If a flight delay runs the hire past its booked end, cover extends automatically for up to 24 hours.

The risk is carried by Inter Partner Assistance S.A., part of the AXA Group, with its head office in Brussels and a UK branch at 106-118 Station Road, Redhill RH1 1PR. It is authorised and regulated by the National Bank of Belgium and authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority under firm reference 202664. Etrawler sells the policy as an appointed representative of that insurer rather than under its own authorisation, which is a common arrangement in travel and one the regulator has said generates markedly more supervisory work than directly authorised firms do.

Cancelling is unusually easy, and it is a fair point in the brand's favour. The cooling-off period runs from the moment you buy until the hire agreement begins, for any reason, with a full refund of the premium where no claim has been made. If you are talked into a second excess policy at the pick-up desk and have not claimed, the document says you can have your Premium Insurance premium back on production of proof of purchase.

The clauses that decide whether you are covered at all

Four eligibility conditions sit in the restrictions box, and each of them disqualifies somebody. The vehicle must have no more than 9 seats, which rules out the nine-plus minibus a large family group books. The rental must not exceed 62 days, and the document says cover expires automatically at the end of its term and cannot be extended to cover an extended rental. You must be a named driver on the rental agreement, so a policy bought by the person paying does not follow the person driving. And you must permanently reside in the United Kingdom.

The geography is the bigger trap. Cover is described as worldwide and then excludes thirteen countries: Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, North Korea, Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe — and the United States. Twelve of those are sanctions-shaped and nobody books a holiday hire car in them. The thirteenth is one of the largest leisure car hire markets British holidaymakers use, and American rental desks are exactly where excess charges and liability questions get expensive.

Four categories of damage are excluded outright: interior damage, mechanical failure or repairs, general wear and tear, and anything already defective when the rental began. Cover also stops if the vehicle is driven off a public highway. The interior exclusion is the one that costs money in practice, because rental companies price interior soiling and damage on their own published schedules and bill for it the same way they bill for a scratched door.

What Which? found when it priced the same cover elsewhere

Which? is the only independent assessor that reaches this sector at all — Defaqto, Fairer Finance and the Financial Ombudsman Service do not rate car hire or car hire brokers — and its car hire insurance review, published 29 April 2026 with prices checked in March 2026, scored policies across 21 rated elements on a quote for a 45-year-old renting the smallest car for a week from Malaga.

Holiday Autos Premium Insurance scored 51% at £30.46 for the week, with a per-claim limit of £2,500. Two readings of that are both true and the page owes you both. Against the other broker add-ons it is the cheapest of the nine Which? priced: DoYouSpain £32.81, Autoeurope £35, Expedia £38.22, Zest £40.25, Booking.com and Rentalcars.com £44.16, Holiday Extras £45.90, DiscoverCars £47.59 and Wisecars £61.53. Against the cover sold at the rental desk it is cheaper by a factor of three to nine: Sixt All Inclusive Protection £110, Goldcar Super Relax £159, Avis Inclusive £167, Enterprise Excess Protection £166, Hertz SuperCover £169, Budget Vehicle Cover Plus £227, Alamo £245 and Europcar Premium Protection £287.

Against a standalone policy bought before you travel, it is neither cheap nor comprehensive. Cover4Rentals Silver scored 89% at £12.24 for the same week, with a per-claim limit of £10,000 — four times Holiday Autos' limit for two-fifths of the price — and £30.50 buys a full year of European cover rather than one week of it. SimplyExcess scored 85% at £15.99, Gigasure 81% at £27.24 and Questor 76% at £21.16. On misfuelling the gap is starker still: £250 here against £3,000 on Cover4Rentals and £1,500 on Zest.

Which? also gives the reason any of this matters, in figures from the same research: a typical hire car excess runs £200 to £2,500, and European repair charges it collected included about €350 for a scratched door, €360 for a puncture and up to €900 for a windscreen. Guy Hobbs, writing the review, put the conclusion plainly — the insurance sold by car hire companies is expensive and offers comparatively poor cover.

A brand that has outlived three owners, and has just changed hands again

Holiday Autos is a brand rather than a company. The quote engine, the booking conditions, the customer portal and the Android app all belong to CarTrawler — the app is published under the identifier com.cartrawler.holidayautos — and CarTrawler itself has just been bought.

Expedia Group announced the agreement on 20 May 2026, describing CarTrawler as connecting 550+ car rental suppliers and 500+ mobility suppliers to more than 300 leading travel brands, including over 70 airlines, across a network spanning more than 50,000 locations, with a team of over 300 specialists. Alfonso Paredes, Expedia Group's President B2B and Chief Commercial Officer, called it another step towards the company's ambition, and CarTrawler's chief executive Peter O'Donovan pointed to the strength of the technology his team had built. CarTrawler's own newsroom confirmed completion in a note dated 1 September 2026, and its corporate pages now carry the line that it is part of Expedia Group B2B.

That has a visible fingerprint in the filing history: Etrawler UK Limited extended its accounting reference date from 30 September to 31 December on 2 October 2026, which is the quarter end its new parent reports on. The reading is this page's own rather than anything either company has stated.

For a renter the practical consequence is modest and mostly positive — more suppliers, a larger buyer behind the platform — but it is worth knowing that Expedia also sells car hire under its own name, and that Which? priced Expedia Plus Car Protection Plan at £38.22 with a £3,500 limit against Holiday Autos' £30.46 and £2,500. Two excess products from one group, two prices, two limits.

Where a complaint goes, and where it runs out of road

This is the weakest part of the proposition and it needs stating carefully. The booking conditions published for the Holiday Autos engine carry a section headed Complaints Procedure with no text underneath it, and a section headed Fees and Charges that names no fee and no amount. Both headings are there; neither section says anything.

CarTrawler's sister product does publish a procedure, and it is a reasonable one: on the airport transfer terms a complaint must be received within 30 days of the end of the journey, with up to 20 working days allowed for investigation, cancellations more than 24 hours ahead generally refunded in full and nothing refunded inside that window, plus a flat €5 charge in one narrow taxi case. Those are transfer terms, not car hire terms, and a renter cannot safely assume the same clock applies to a car.

The escalation route on those same transfer terms is dead. They send an unresolved complaint to the European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform, which the Commission's own notice says is discontinued as of 20 July 2025 following Regulation (EU) 2024/3228. The Commission now publishes a directory of national bodies instead; the link in the terms goes nowhere useful.

Nor is there an ombudsman at the end of it. The rental sector does have an approved scheme — the BVRLA runs a government-approved consumer ADR body under the Alternative Dispute Resolution for Consumer Disputes Regulations 2015, and its code obliges a member to acknowledge a complaint within five working days and resolve it within 15 — but that binds rental companies, and Holiday Autos is not one. The insurance half is better served: Inter Partner Assistance is a PRA-authorised insurer subject to Financial Conduct Authority regulation, so a dispute about the policy can reach the Financial Ombudsman Service even though a dispute about the booking cannot.

Where it wins

Publishes a full Insurance Product Information Document for the excess product, naming the insurer, thirteen separate reimbursement limits and the exclusions — more than most car hire brokers disclose before the final click
The cheapest of the nine broker excess policies Which? priced in March 2026, at £30.46 for a week in Spain against £32.81 to £61.53 for the rest
Between three and nine times cheaper than the equivalent cover sold at the rental desk, which Which? priced from £110 at Sixt to £287 at Europcar
Cover is wide in scope for an add-on: £650 glass, £500 roof, £450 keys, £400 undercarriage, £250 each for misfuelling, roadside assistance, personal possessions and loss of use, and £100 of the hire company's administration charges
Automatic 24-hour extension if a flight delay runs the rental past its booked end
Cooling-off runs from purchase right up to the start of the hire, with a full premium refund where nothing has been claimed, and a refund is available if you are sold a second excess policy at the desk
Backed by Inter Partner Assistance S.A., part of the AXA Group, authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority under firm reference 202664, so a policy dispute can reach the Financial Ombudsman Service
Scale behind the search box: 550 car rental suppliers and more than 50,000 locations, on the same platform more than 70 airlines use

Where it falls short

Premium Insurance does not cover the United States, one of the biggest leisure car hire markets British holidaymakers use, and the exclusion sits in a list of thirteen countries that otherwise reads as a sanctions list
It is a refund, not a waiver: the rental company still takes the excess from your card first, and the product document requires a credit card with a sufficient limit — a renter with a £1,000 limit facing a £2,500 excess is stuck
Holiday Autos publishes no price for Premium Insurance anywhere a shopper can read before quoting, while its Rewards+ scheme advertises up to 20% off it — a discount on a figure nobody can see
Which? scored it 51% across 21 policy elements against 89% for the best standalone policy, which cost £12.24 for the same week and carried a £10,000 limit against this one's £2,500
The £2,500 limit is exactly the top of the typical excess range Which? reports, so on the worst day the cover is sufficient and no more, with nothing above it
Misfuelling is capped at £250 against £3,000 on the top-scoring standalone policy, and interior damage is excluded outright even though rental companies bill for it
The booking conditions publish a Complaints Procedure heading with no procedure under it, and a Fees and Charges heading that names no fee
The sister airport transfer terms still refer an unresolved complaint to the EU Online Dispute Resolution platform, discontinued on 20 July 2025 under Regulation (EU) 2024/3228
No ombudsman covers the booking: the BVRLA's approved ADR scheme binds rental companies and Holiday Autos is not one, so only the insurance half has a route to the Financial Ombudsman Service
A UK customer contracts with an Irish unlimited company under the laws of Ireland, with liability limited to the amount paid for the hire, even though the group has had a London-registered company since 11 June 2013
The brand's own terms, help and FAQ pages return nothing readable to a plain request — every word of them is assembled in the browser, so none of it can be quoted, saved or checked later

Common questions

Does Holiday Autos own the cars it rents out?

No. The booking conditions say the contract for the car is between you and the rental supplier, and that CarTrawler, which runs the booking engine, does not own or operate any transportation and is not a transportation supplier. The company taking the booking is Etrawler Unlimited Company, Irish company 93433, registered at Classon House, Dundrum Business Park, Dublin 14, and the conditions are governed by the laws of Ireland.

How much excess will the rental company hold, and how much does Premium Insurance pay back?

The excess is set by whichever supplier you book, not by Holiday Autos, and Which? reports a typical range of £200 to £2,500. Premium Insurance refunds up to £2,500 of it, plus £650 for glass, £500 for the roof, £450 for keys, £400 for the undercarriage, £250 for misfuelling and £150 to replace a tyre. It pays you back after the event rather than stopping the charge, so the money leaves your credit card first.

Can I use Premium Insurance for a hire car in the United States?

No. Cover is sold as worldwide and then excludes thirteen countries, one of which is the USA. The others are Afghanistan, Belarus, Cuba, Congo, Iran, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Liberia, North Korea, Burma, Sudan and Zimbabwe. You also have to be a permanent UK resident, named on the rental agreement, in a vehicle of no more than nine seats, for no longer than 62 days.

Is the excess cover cheaper here than at the rental desk?

On the figures Which? collected in March 2026, yes, by a wide margin. It priced Holiday Autos Premium Insurance at £30.46 for a week in Spain against £110 for Sixt All Inclusive Protection, £167 for Avis Inclusive, £169 for Hertz SuperCover, £227 for Budget Vehicle Cover Plus and £287 for Europcar Premium Protection. A standalone policy bought before you travel was cheaper again, from £12.24 for the week or £30.50 for a year of European cover.

Who insures Premium Insurance, and who can I complain to?

The insurer is Inter Partner Assistance S.A., part of the AXA Group, with its head office in Brussels and a UK branch at 106-118 Station Road, Redhill RH1 1PR, authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority under firm reference 202664. Etrawler sells the policy as its appointed representative. A complaint about the policy can therefore reach the Financial Ombudsman Service. A complaint about the booking itself has no ombudsman: the BVRLA's approved ADR scheme covers rental companies rather than brokers.

Can I cancel Premium Insurance after I have bought it?

Yes, up to the point the hire agreement begins, for any reason, with a full refund of the premium provided no claim has been made. The product document also says that if you buy a separate excess policy when you collect the car and have made no claim, you can have your premium back on production of proof of purchase. Cover itself runs from when you take the car until you return it, to a maximum of 62 days, and extends automatically for up to 24 hours if a delay keeps you out longer.

Our verdict

Holiday Autos is a search engine with a well-documented insurance product bolted to the end of it, and both halves are worth judging separately. The search is broad and the platform is serious: 550 rental suppliers, more than 50,000 locations, and an owner since 1 September 2026 in Expedia Group. The insurance is the cheapest of the nine broker excess policies Which? priced in March 2026 at £30.46 a week, and a third to a ninth of what the same cover costs at the rental desk, which is a genuine saving for anyone who would otherwise be sold Premium Protection at £287 in Malaga. But it is a reimbursement policy capped at £2,500 with a 51% Which? score, against £12.24 and £10,000 from the best standalone insurer, and it will not cover a hire car in the United States at all. Book the car here by all means; if you are hiring in Europe and have a spare ten minutes, buy the excess cover somewhere else, and if you are hiring in America you will have to.

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