Where you cancollect a carEvery pickup point on the island · and what each one is for

There are 11 pickup points on this island, and which one you choose changes less about the car rental than people expect: the same suppliers serve most of them, and the car you book is the car you get wherever you pick it up. What it does change is the half hour at either end of your holiday.

That half hour is worth more than it sounds on an island shaped like this one. Tenerife is two coasts with a volcano between them, so the difference between collecting where you land and collecting where you are staying can be an hour of motorway at each end of a fortnight. The list below says what each pickup point is actually for, and how far it is from the southern airport, which is where nearly every flight arrives.

Collect at the airport if you want the car from the moment you land, which is what most people want and what the widest choice supports. Collect in a resort instead when the car is only for part of the week, because a car sitting in a hotel car park is costing you twice: once in the hire and once in the parking. And if you are flying into one airport and out of the other, set the drop-off point in the search rather than planning a drive back across the island. The airport pair is the deepest one-way route on the island, and a one-way hire from Tenerife South Airport to Tenerife North Airport is priced into the booking before you commit. There is one more option that is not a place at all, and it is worth knowing about. Alongside the points above, the booking page offers Tenerife as a single island-wide pickup: choose it and the search returns every car on the island in one list rather than the cars at one point, and each car then tells you where it is collected or whether it is delivered. Search the whole island in one go → It is the widest choice you can put in front of yourself, and it suits an open plan: pick the car first, then let the collection arrangement follow.

One thing does not vary by pickup point, and it is the thing most likely to go wrong: what you have to hand over when you get there. The licence has to be the card itself, not a photograph and not a copy, and the payment card has to be in the main driver's name, usually a physical credit card with raised numbers for the deposit hold. Your voucher says whether a debit card is accepted for your car. That is the same in the capital as it is at the terminal, and it is the single most common reason a pickup fails.

Every time on this page is without traffic, so a real journey is that or longer, never shorter.