Rent a car

By John Walton, May 30 2012
Rent a car

If you're heading to New Zealand and renting a car, you can now pick up a rental portable 3G wifi router from Hertz when you reach the airport.

Hertz is offering the portable mobile wifi routers, commonly known as "pocket wifi" or "mifi" devices, at Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown airports. (Hertz already offers mifis in the UK.)

You'll pay NZ$12.95 + GST a day (just over A$12), which is reasonable enough if you're on a short trip or you value the convenience of picking up your mifi with your car keys.

There's a 150MB daily data limit, which rules out using the device for anything truly data-intensive like video (or even sending more than a few large PowerPoint files). It should be enough for a day's use of mobile data for navigation, light browsing, email and a bit of voice-over-Internet like Skype, though.

In context, New Zealand is one of the most expensive countries for mobile (or fixed) Internet, with hotels regularly charging NZ$30 or more for 100MB of data.

For more on mobile data in New Zealand, check out our road-tested guide to picking the best Kiwi data SIM.

As a result, regular NZ travellers will probably be better off picking up a local SIM card for their phone (or their own portable 3G-wifi router).

Our recommendations: 2degrees if you'll be staying in the cities where 2degrees has coverage, or NZ Telecom if you'll be travelling outside the major areas.

John Walton

Aviation journalist and travel columnist John took his first long-haul flight when he was eight weeks old and hasn't looked back since. Well, except when facing rearwards in business class.


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