Luxury SUV rental, French Riviera and the Alps

This is the only class of car we run in both seasons, and the two jobs have almost nothing in common. On the coast between April and October, an SUV is a car that has to get into a car park. In the Alps between December and April, it is a car that has to be legal, equipped and on the right side of a single road. Same badge, same seats, two different sets of questions — and the operators who serve one of the two seasons rarely think about the other.

So this page is written in two halves. Read the one that matches your dates.

Not distance. Height. In Cannes, the car park under the Palais des Festivals is capped at 1.80 m, P02 Suquet Forville and the station car park at 1.90 m, and only level 1 of P04 Pantiero clears 2.40 m — its level 2 drops straight back to 1.90 m. In Nice, P2 against Terminal 1 is 1.85 m, P5 against Terminal 2 is 2.10 m, and P6 reaches 2.30 m but touches neither terminal, being served by a free electric shuttle every fifteen minutes. In Monaco, most garages sit between 1.90 m and 2.20 m, and above 2.20 m a vehicle changes tariff class outright.

Rolls-Royce quotes the Cullinan at 1.835 m unladen. At P2 in Nice that leaves a centimetre and a half before anyone asks the air suspension to do anything. This is why we settle the car first and the meeting point second, and why we ask which model you want before we tell you where to meet it.

Winter equipment is a legal obligation, not a precaution. It runs from 1 November to 31 March in the communes designated by prefectural order and marked by roadside signs, across the massifs, and a compliant car has either four tyres carrying the 3PMSF three-peak snowflake mark, or chains, or snow socks on board for at least two driven wheels. An M+S marking on its own has not been enough since 1 November 2024.

Two departments matter to us and they are handled differently on paper but identically in practice. Savoie — Courchevel and Val d'Isère — applies the obligation to the whole department, by prefectural order DS-BSRPRRDC/2021-53 of 27 September 2021. Haute-Savoie — Megève — applies it to the whole road network by prefectural order of 30 September 2021, across 279 communes.

Now the part nobody publishes. The decree that would make the fine enforceable has not been published. A Senate answer of 12 February 2026, to a question filed on 6 November 2025, records that the order amending the snow-tyre rules only appeared on 30 October 2025, too late for the sanctions decree to follow, so no fine was enforceable for the 2025-26 winter. We have found no publication settling the position for 2026-27 as of 3 August 2026, and we are not going to guess at one. It changes nothing about what we source: every car we arrange in that window leaves compliant, because what is at stake in an accident is not whether anyone was checking.

One local rule that outlives the decree. Val d'Isère's lifts are announced to 2 May 2027 — five weeks of full operation after the legal obligation lapses on 31 March. A car delivered in mid-April is outside the text and still on the same road, above 1,800 m, in spring snow. We hold the equipment standard to closing day.

Read that table again with a roof box on the car. A box adds height to a vehicle that already stands tall, and the resorts that will take the result are named and few. At Courchevel, past two metres you are locked out of Croisette, Porte de Courchevel and Moriond, and marginal everywhere rated 2.10 m; Sarettà, Loze, Alpamayor and Alpinium take it. At Val d'Isère the lowest ceiling in the resort is at the entrance to the resort.

Which is why the question we ask is not how many people, but how many pairs of skis. Six people and six pairs is a different car from six people and none, and it is settled at the booking rather than at the barrier.

Three shapes sit on this page. Two rows and four seats, where the rear is a lounge rather than a bench. Two rows and five seats, which is most of it. And three rows, seven or eight seats, which is what a family of six with equipment actually needs.

There is a caveat on the third one, and it is honest rather than clever. Our data carries a single luggage figure per car and does not say whether the third row is up or folded. On a week for six people with skis, that distinction is the entire question. We settle the real configuration with the operator before confirming, and if the answer is that the third row and the luggage cannot both exist, we say so and price a second vehicle.

In summer it is Nice: 15.23 million passengers in 2025, and second in Europe for business aviation movements behind Paris-Le Bourget. From the terminals we work to 27 km and thirty minutes to Cannes, sixty in season; 32 km and thirty-five minutes to Monaco, seventy in season; 120 km and a hundred minutes to Saint-Tropez, a hundred and eighty on a bad August day.

In winter it is Geneva: 17,848,370 passengers in 2025. From there we work to 75 km and 1 h 15 to Megève, 2 h 10 in season; 150 km and 2 h 30 to Courchevel, 4 h 30 in season; 185 km and three hours to Val d'Isère, five hours in season. Read the second number in each pair. It is not a disclaimer, it is the number that describes a Saturday.

Four-wheel drive does not create a second road into the Tarentaise. There is one. The A43 runs to Chambéry, the RN90 goes on through Albertville and Moûtiers, and that single road serves every resort in the valley — more than two hundred thousand vehicles across the Tarentaise and Maurienne on a peak weekend. The chokepoint has a name and a precedent: the Gorges de Ponserand, at the northern exit of Moûtiers, where a rockfall in February 2025 severed access outright and traffic was held only by reversing the Ponserand tunnel to two-way running. The Savoie prefecture keeps a live works page for the RN90, and that page is what gets read on the morning of a transfer.

Megève sits on a different funnel with the same problem. The A40's concessionaire puts winter weekend traffic at three times normal, around 80,000 vehicles on a peak Saturday, worst between 09:00 and 13:00 and again between 16:00 and 20:00. Bison Futé classified Saturday 21 February 2026 red for Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and told drivers to avoid the A40 between Mâcon and Passy from 11:00 to 16:00 outbound.

And the bad Saturdays are knowable a year out, because the school calendar sets them. For 2027, zone C runs 6 to 22 February, zone A 13 February to 1 March, zone B 20 February to 8 March. That makes Saturday 13, 20 and 27 February the days two zones move at once. If your dates land on one of them we will say so and propose a Friday or a Sunday, rather than quietly sell you a transfer that will take four and a half hours.

One more thing an SUV does not solve: the last hundred metres. Megève's pedestrian zone bollards stay raised seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and an outside private-hire vehicle gets fifteen minutes inside on a compulsory route. No car reaches the church square. The vehicle is the easy part of this.