Cheap car hirein TenerifeEvery car on the island, priced live for your own dates

Cheap car hire in Tenerife is decided by when you book, not by how long you hunt, and the same is true of every car rental on the island. The low end of this island is a thin layer of small cars, and winter is the high season here rather than summer, so the same small hatchback is one price in October and quite another in the week before Christmas. What saves money is booking early on your own dates and knowing what is attached to the car: the deposit held against your card, what the cover leaves out, and the fuel rule. All three sit on every car in every car on the island above, priced for your dates, from cheap car hire at Tenerife South airport to the resort pickup points and the north.

The cars come from local suppliers who run their own fleets on Tenerife, not from a call centre on another continent. That is what makes the low end of this island possible in the first place: they buy for the roads here, they turn cars around at the airport all day, and they compete with each other on the same screen while you watch.

Winter is the season here, not summer, and the cheap end of the choice is thin. From December into January the island fills, the small automatics go first, and the price of what is left climbs hard. Most cars cancel free, which turns an early booking into something close to a free option: hold the car now, and if something better appears you have lost nothing.

Shoulder season is the other half of the answer. October and through the spring choice is wide and the small cars sit unbooked, so the same search that returns almost nothing under a certain price at Christmas returns a page of it in May. If your dates are flexible by a week either way, run the search twice and let the prices tell you which week to take.

The small cars are the value here, and not only on the daily rate. Tenerife's good driving is narrow: the resort streets are tight, the mountain roads are walled, and the parking bays were laid out for cars the size of a Panda. A compact car is cheaper to hire, cheaper to fuel, and easier everywhere you are actually going to take it.

Two things move you up a class. Four adults with luggage climbing to the crater will feel the smallest engines on the way up, so a step up is money well spent if the mountain days are the point of the week. And if nobody in the party drives a manual, filter for an automatic from the start rather than hoping: there are fewer of them here than in the UK, and in the busy weeks they go first. Everything else is the same question answered live for your dates.

The questions below are the ones that come up before a booking: how the search works, when to book, who you are renting from and what to have with you when you collect. The rental conditions themselves are written out in full on the terms page.