We are thinking of renting a car to drive around France. However, while my French is functional, I’d be really hesitant to sign a legal document, ie, a car hire agreement, in French. My question is this: if I rent a car through one of the agencies (easycar, europcar, autoeurope, hertz, avis) is it reasonable to expect that the rental agreement will be in English?
Yes. I rented cars from Hertz in Brussels and Amsterdam earlier this year, all documents and transactions were in English. Note that you can book everything online before you leave.
The only negative I had was in renting a GPS; it was fairly cheap (18 euro IIRC) but if you were returning the car to a different country than you hired it in, that was an extra 100!
We rented in Paris and the agreement was in English. I’m sure they have agreements in multiple languages – it protects them.
I’ve rented in Limoges twice, from Europcar at the airport and from Hertz at the train station and both times documents came in English. I did take the insurance, as my auto coverage doesn’t follow me outside of North America. You might want to check on that.
Rented via Europcar in Lille back in 1980. The documents were in English. We returned the car in Calais two weeks later. We drove through France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Austria.
They did try to over charge my Amex card by $1000, but got it fixed by Amex.
Good times!