New Zealand

Car Hire at Christchurch Airport: The Best Companies

by Mark Rebindaine  |  Published January 29, 2021

Serving New Zealand’s biggest city in the South Island, Christchurch Airport (CHC) is located 8 miles to the northwest of the city centre, in the suburb of Harewood. After Auckland airport, it’s the second busiest airport in New Zealand in both annual passengers and quantity of flights.

Christchurch (Photo: Jim & Robin Kunze via Flickr/ CC BY 2.0)

At the airport, you’ll find all the major car rental companies as well as few other local ones. Incoming passengers can hire vehicles on a pre-booked or walk-up basis. There are also several additional vehicle rental options in Christchurch who provide courtesy transfer shuttles to and from the airport for their pre-booked customers. The courtesy transfer shuttles are found outside Door 2.

To select the best of the multiple options on offer, Travelmag.com has conducted a thorough research to come up with the results below. We’ve split our findings into the following categories: Most Affordable, Best for Luxury and Best for Minivans – so all the major bases are covered.

Most Affordable: Aerodrive and Dollar

Book at Rentalcars.com


In simple terms, renting a car in New Zealand is not cheap and there’s little that can be done about it. But if you search around, you can definitely find some relatively good deals. Out of the most affordable cars, we found Aerodrive to have the best rates in the terminal while Ace Rental Cars (a five minute ride on their free shuttle) had the cheapest rates outside of the airport. Both companies had the Toyota Yaris at a little under €60 per day on our chosen dates (in the late summer). For a more familiar car rental brand, we’d recommend Dollar that had a better overall selection of cars with a Toyota Corolla and the Hyundai Accent featured in its compact category. Dollar also provides a variety of insurance policies: from the ‘Stress-free’ (100% coverage) to the Basic Coverage that will be included in your original quote.

Best for Luxury: Ezi Car Rentals and Aerodrive

Book at Rentalcars.com


Not only does Ezi Car Rentals have the cheapest vehicles in the luxury car bracket, they also average one of the best overall customer feed-back scores on rentalcars.com, 9/10. Ezi’s cheapest ‘premium’ cars come in the form of a Toyota Rav at €66 per day with the added bonus of the price including two drivers. Alternatively, they had a Toyota Carolla at €84 per day. It’d be tempting to recommend more established car rental companies like Europcar and Thrifty in this category but with prices in excess of 100€ per day, it seems only fair to recommend Aero-drive as our second option with vehicles starting off at €65 per day.

Best for Minivans: Avis and Ezi Car Rentals

Book at RentalCars.com


Rather surprisingly, it was the Avis/Budget group that had some of the cheapest daily rates on large people carriers with the eight-seater, Hyundai IMax rented out at €188 per day. More of a SUV than a minivan, Europcar was leasing out the Kia Carnival for 250€ per day. It’s a stylish vehicle that, among its many features, includes an impressive 25.65cm Touchscreen Entertainment System. For larger groups, Ezi Car Rental hires out the spacious twelve-seater Toyota Hiace at a little under €300 per day.