One of the most useful distinctions in our ratings is between what most people do and what we think you should do.
These two scores often line up closely, which is reassuring: it suggests that traveller behaviour, local infrastructure, and the car-hire market are broadly in sync.
- Abu Dhabi, for example, scores 7 for what most people do and 6 for should you rent a car. Most visitors hire a car, and in a spread-out city with limited walkability, that generally makes sense.
- Alicante is an even clearer case: both scores come out at 7, reflecting a destination where car hire is common, affordable, and genuinely useful for exploring the wider region.
Where things get more interesting is when the two ratings don’t match. These gaps are deliberate, and they highlight places where habit, assumption, or marketing nudges people one way, while a closer look suggests an alternative might work better.
- Venice is a good example. Most people quite reasonably assume that renting a car there makes no sense at all — and many don’t.
But for travellers who are actually asking the question, a car can be surprisingly useful, especially if Venice is just one stop on a wider itinerary that includes the Veneto, the Dolomites, or less accessible mainland towns.
In that case, our recommendation score is higher than the “most people do” score, because the car enables experiences that aren’t obvious at first glance. - At the opposite end of the spectrum sits Orlando. Here, most people do rent a car — hence the high score — but our should you rating is deliberately lower.
The reason is practical rather than ideological. In many cases, hired cars spend most of their time parked in vast theme-park lots, followed by a shuttle bus ride to the entrance anyway.
Add in expensive parking fees, toll roads, and the comparatively high cost of US car rental for first-time European visitors, and the value proposition starts to wobble.
For many visitors, resort shuttles and park transport do the same job with less stress and lower cost.
Overall, the “what most people do” score is a rough behavioural snapshot, shaped by factors like airport car-hire availability, local pricing, road culture, and how destinations are marketed.
It is a very loose estimate, given that actual car rental data is often a closely guarded commercial secret.
The “should you rent a car” score takes a step back and asks whether that behaviour is actually necessary or beneficial, given public transport links, urban layout, and how travellers really move once they arrive. The two scores are often aligned — but when they aren’t, that gap is exactly where the most useful advice lives.
Hybrid situations
Some destinations sit firmly in the middle ground, where both scores need a bit more nuance.
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is a classic example. Both the city itself and Netherlands more broadly are famous for cycling as the dominant mode of transport, backed up by dense, reliable public transport that reaches virtually every corner of the country.
On the surface, this makes the idea of renting a car in Amsterdam feel unnecessary, even faintly absurd. Most people don’t do it, and they get around just fine without one.
But Car No Car is specifically answering the question: should you rent a car in Amsterdam? And if you are genuinely asking it, the answer isn’t as clear-cut as the stereotypes suggest.
Outside the historic centre, driving standards are high, roads are excellent, signage is clear, and congestion levels drop off quickly once you leave the inner city.
For travellers planning day trips to smaller towns, coastal areas, or rural provinces, a car can be a perfectly sensible and low-stress option — even if it’s not what most visitors instinctively choose.
Hong Kong
A different kind of hybrid appears in Hong Kong. For almost all practical purposes, hiring a car here is a bad idea: public transport is world-class, parking is expensive, and urban driving is rarely faster or easier than taking the MTR.
As a result, hardly anyone rents a car, and for standard sightseeing, we wouldn’t recommend it either – and airport car rental simply isn’t an option anyway. The scores reflect that reality very clearly.
However, if someone is actively asking whether they should rent a car in Hong Kong, they may be thinking less about transport and more about experience. In that very narrow sense, there is a niche case for hiring a car downtown for a single day, purely to drive.
Hong Kong’s bridges, tunnels, mountain roads, and harbour crossings are genuinely spectacular, and a day (and evening) spent looping through them can be memorable in its own right.
Parking becomes almost irrelevant because the point isn’t where you stop — it’s the act of driving itself. That said, this remains a minority pursuit, and one that most visitors quite sensibly never consider.
Hybrid situations like these are where the distinction between what people do and what we’d advise becomes most interesting. They’re not contradictions so much as edge cases — places where context, intent, and curiosity matter just as much as infrastructure or habit.