{"id":2276,"date":"2018-10-01T22:52:32","date_gmt":"2018-10-02T02:52:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/?p=2276"},"modified":"2018-10-01T22:52:32","modified_gmt":"2018-10-02T02:52:32","slug":"driving-a-rental-car-in-switzerland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/driving-a-rental-car-in-switzerland\/","title":{"rendered":"Driving a rental car in Switzerland"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, I visited Switzerland for vacation (Sep &#8217;18) and spent a week driving around sightseeing with family.<\/p>\n<p><em>Disclaimer:\u00a0you should do your own research (regarding topics such as driving laws).<\/em><\/p>\n<p>While I&#8217;ve read many great things about the public transportation system (trains &amp; buses) and I would encourage you to take their excellent train system, driving made sense for our situation.<\/p>\n<h3>Pros<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Direct transportation<\/strong>. Walking between the train station &amp; hotel each day is not trivial. The uphill hike from the train station to\u00a0Gruy\u00e8re didn&#8217;t seem easy either.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Flexible<\/strong>. Not being tied to a train\/bus schedule allowed us to see more places.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Scalable<\/strong>. Having a large car makes sense financially with a large group. Our 8 day car rental was $400. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.swiss-pass.ch\/swiss-pass\/\">A\u00a02nd class, 8 day unlimited train ticket is over $400<\/a> for one person.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Storage capacity<\/strong>. Storing infant items, extra clothes, etc. in your car is very convenient.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Park centrally<\/strong>. All the city centers we visited had parking near the tourist areas (such as old town). The blue &#8216;P&#8217; signs are very easy to find when you are looking for parking nearby.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Cons<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Parking<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Expensive<\/strong>. This goes without saying if you are planning a trip to Switzerland. Parking in the city center for a day is not cheap. Bern was\u00a0particularly expensive to park in. In Bern, I made the tradeoff to pay more for parking and enjoy the city longer.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Coins<\/strong>. Older parking areas may require coins (if they do not accept credit card).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Tight parking<\/strong>. Many older cities (such as Zurich) have extremely narrow parking spots &amp; turns. This is a huge factor if you care about not scratching your rental car. Drive carefully &amp; slow.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Language<\/strong>. The parking signs may not have English instructions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Speed limits<\/strong>. I did my best to stay under the speed limit everywhere. I was told (online &amp; in-person) that speeding in Switzerland comes with big fines. Driving &amp; constantly checking your speed makes for very stressful driving.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Expensive<\/strong>. The cost of car rental, parking, and gas quickly add up. However, I felt the cost of driving wasn&#8217;t bad compared to buying a few train passes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Tips<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>While driving in Zurich, many parking garages would show &#8220;FREI&#8221;. This confused me initially as I read it as &#8220;free parking&#8221; (no cost). The actual meaning is &#8220;free spots&#8221; (parking available).<\/li>\n<li>Not a big deal, there are a lot of tunnels to drive through around the country.<\/li>\n<li>My rental car had a number of helpful features: current location speed limit display, parking collision detection, and standard GPS navigation. I&#8217;d highly recommend these features.<\/li>\n<li>To stay under or at the speed limit, I often relied on my rental car&#8217;s cruise control system to set the exact speed. Beware because you will often enter lower speed areas, and you&#8217;ll need to lower your speed suddenly.<\/li>\n<li>While driving in Switzerland, your headlights always need to be on. I set my car rental to have automatic lights. Easy.<\/li>\n<li>I would recommend renting from Sixt at the Zurich airport. (I have no affiliation with them.) I was able to get my BMW 2 series rental quickly and received good customer service.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.myswitzerland.com\/en-us\/carfree-destinations.html\">There are car free areas in Switzerland<\/a>, so do not plan to drive to them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Driving in Switzerland is not cheap, but it comes with many benefits. I would recommend driving in Switzerland if you are traveling with a large family or kids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, I visited Switzerland for vacation (Sep &#8217;18) and spent a week driving around sightseeing with family. Disclaimer:\u00a0you should do your own research (regarding topics such as driving laws). While I&#8217;ve read many great things about the public transportation system (trains &amp; buses) and I would encourage you to take their excellent train system, driving [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[1220,1418,899,1417,1416,1413,1414,1248,1251,1415],"class_list":["post-2276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-driving","tag-parking","tag-rental","tag-rentalcar","tag-sixt","tag-swiss","tag-swizterland","tag-travel","tag-vacation","tag-zurich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2284,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2276\/revisions\/2284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rexfeng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}