Airport Parking & Holiday Car Rental

Parking is notoriously expensive at Melbourne Tullamarine Airport. I preferred to catch a taxi for short (3 days - 1 week) domestic holidays as we live quite near the airport and the return taxi trip cost about the same as the long term parking at Melbourne airport. That's for the outdoor parking where you have to catch a shuttle bus, forget about the indoor parking within walking distance as that will easily set you back $100+ for just a few days.

This time we decided to try a different parking provider so I went with A1 Airport Parking as they are quite cheap, outdoor parking cost us under $40 for our 4 days trip with RACV discount. We arrived there about 1 hour before our flight and thankfully their paperwork processing was very quick and we only have to drop the car near the entrance and we were on to the complimentary shuttle bus in just a few minutes.

Coming back was just as easy. Rang them after our plane arrived and then waited a bit and boarded their bus at the airport bus area and our car was there waiting for us. It's definitely a cheap and good option for short holidays, or even for longer holidays for those of you who live far from the airport.

The other thing I learned is the upgrade to the highest insurance cover available when renting a car is well worth it. The standard car rental damage excess is in the thousands of dollars. You can reduce the excess to either a few hundred dollars or to $0, depending on how much extra you are willing to pay per day.

You may be a careful and good driver but you have little controls over the other drivers on the road. If you are driving on country roads here in Australia, you would occasionally get loose stones from trucks coming in the opposite direction too. I have had a couple small stones on the windscreen before and this time I actually had a rather big one that dented the roof just above the windscreen. Luckily I paid for the ultimate protection so there was no excess fees whatsoever, just had to fill in an incident report when I returned the car.

This time we went with Thrifty due to RACV discount again and the free child car seat. They gave us a rather new car (only 1500km on it when we picked it up) so it's a shame that I dented their car.