I’ve spent a bit of time tonight plugging details into the various travel sites around the internet such as Expedia, Travelocity and a couple of airline sites, for our next trip back to Canada.

Whilst I can get an attractive package in terms of the flights, and a hotel for the first night, getting a quote on the car hire seems to be a lot more difficult, as Expedia, and all the sites that repackage their services, just will not give me any choice for the car hire, it just keeps returning rental options from Alamo and nobody else.

As to why I have a problem with a rental from Alamo, it comes down to the small print – specifically the definition of off-road driving. For obvious reasons, the rental companies don’t want to keep their vehicles in good condition, so as part of that, they ban off-road driving, even for the 4×4’s. The problem is that most of the rental companies define off-road rather restrictively as being anywhere that isn’t paved – which causes a bit of a problem when miles and miles of back roads in Alberta are only maintained with either oiled or gravel surfaces. Driving off-road automatically invalidates the insurance on the rental vehicle, so considering that the only way to get to Beth’s parents place is down one of these 10km gravel roads, pictured above, you can see the problem.

Having said that, it is not all rental companies. When this problem came to light a couple of years ago, I phoned round the rental companies in Calgary, and there is some flexibility from some of the companies. For example Hertz define off-road in Alberta as driving off any road that is ‘not regularly maintained’, and confirmed over the phone that we’d be allowed to drive the road down to Beth’s parents place.

So if anybody can tell me how to persuade Expedia to give me a rental from somebody other than Alamo, I’d really like to know how…