This site is kept by two private individuals who have spent a long time on the hire side of a counter in Mpumalanga, handing over keys at dawn and taking them back dusty. It is not a business, it does not hire cars out, and it earns nothing from anybody whose paperwork it reads.
It started as a printed page. We got tired of explaining the same six things to the same tired travellers at the same bay, so we wrote them down and photocopied them. The page became four pages, the four pages became a folder that people asked to photograph with their phones, and eventually it made more sense to put the whole thing where anyone could read it the night before rather than in the ninety seconds before they drive off.
The counter view is a specific one and we make no apology for it. We think most hire disputes are caused by paper nobody read, not by dishonesty. We think the excess figure should be the first number quoted and almost never is. And we think the hire industry around a tourist region quietly assumes that every visitor knows what a gravel clause is, which is plainly untrue and occasionally very expensive for somebody on a pension.
Our readers are mostly over forty-five, often driving with a spouse who has opinions about seat comfort, often with grandchildren's seats to fit, and frequently here for a week of the escarpment and the reserve rather than a day. That shapes what we write about. Boot litres, sill heights, aircon recovery time and service intervals matter more to this reader than nought to a hundred, which we have never once been asked about at a counter.
We write about the Lowveld because it is the road we know. The passes make their own weather, the heat is hard on tyres and air conditioning, the gravel into the reserves is better than its reputation and worse than it looks after rain, and two international borders sit within a morning's drive. Advice written for a flat city does not survive contact with any of it.
If we cannot put a number on something, we say so. Rand ranges are indicative and labelled as such, distances are measured, pressures are given cold, and a seat is described by how far it adjusts rather than by how premium it feels.
Nobody pays to appear here. We take no commission from counters, lodges or showrooms, we accept no cars on loan in exchange for coverage, and the week-long hires we write about come out of our own pockets at the rates anyone else would pay.
Rates move, fleets change, and a clause that read one way at one counter reads differently at another. Where we are not sure, the text says ask and get it initialled, because an initialled sentence on a contract beats a confident paragraph on a website.
Five minutes of reading at this desk has saved readers five-figure excess claims more than once. Tell us the car class, the dates, the route and the counter, and we will come back with the figures that matter.