I need to hire a car for the first week of August, do all hire companies require a credit card to do this? From looking online it looks like that, I don’t have and don’t want a credit card. I have only got a visa debit card would this be sufficient to hire a car?

Any experiences?

Can’t answer that but we once took a car from the French side to save money on our trip to the 3 valleys. It’s cheaper because you don’t get a pass for the Swiss motorways but this made it really complicated getting the car back to the right spot. Very stressful, not worth the saving.

yep – you’ll need a credit card for pretty much any hire car company. you may be lucky and find one who will accept a debit card, but will ask for a big damage deposit.

On what mugboo said about hiring French side, it is a little trickier to get there and you can’t use the Swiss motorways without a vignette (but you can buy one for €40 I think), you just need to do a little more planning. Personally, I think the extra bit of planning on your directions and motorway avoidance is worth the 20-25% saving on the hire cost.

They certainly asked for one when I picked mine up from Budget last week, but in fairness they only pre-authorised about CHF60 to cover filling it up if I didn’t so they might be happy with a debit card?

Booked mine via Angus, they claimed if I didn’t pay the £50 CDW they’d need CHF7000 pre-authorised, which was a bit of a stinger – most ‘internet experts’ told me that CDW was cheaper at the desk via Budget, £17 or so….

they wanted CHF200, so I drove off with an excess of CHF7000 and CDW via my travel insurance of £1500… a few pucker up moments driving a LHD car up the Alps for the first time.

As above, I believe all companies require a credit card.

Just get one and don’t use it for things you can’t really afford and set it up so the balance is cleared every month. FWIW I put all my spending though an airmiles credit card which is automatically cleared every month.