Junie's Car Rental

About the agency

Junie's Car Rental is a family-owned operation that has been renting to visitors and residents for over 15 years, working out of a desk at Blowing Point ferry terminal in partnership with Calypso Charters. Walk out of the arrivals area, look to your right, and someone from the team is there. That is the whole pitch and it is a good one, because Blowing Point is where most visitors to Anguilla actually land, arriving by boat from Marigot or on the SXM airport ferries, while most of the island's rental offices sit fifteen minutes away on the other coast near the airport. Junie's also meet arrivals at Clayton J. Lloyd International and deliver anywhere on the island to a hotel or villa. Unusually, walk-ups are welcome as well as advance reservations, so if your plans changed on the boat you are not stuck. The fleet is entirely right-hand drive, sourced from Japan. This is the most interesting thing about Junie's and almost nobody explains why it matters. Anguilla drives on the left, as the British Caribbean does, so a right-hand drive car puts you on the correct side to judge road position and oncoming clearance. The harder combination is the one much of this island supplies by default, sitting on the left while driving on the left, which is what most American visitors end up in without ever being offered a choice. There is also a reason these cars turn up in the condition they do. Japan's mandatory shaken inspection regime makes keeping an older car through repeated inspections cost more than the car is worth, so perfectly good vehicles get sold and exported rather than run into the ground. They arrive with low mileage and full service histories. Expect names like the Nissan March, Nissan Cube and Toyota Vitz at the small end, with SUVs and an eight-seat mini wagon further up. The rates, and the correction worth making. Small Cars start at $40 a day, Medium Cars at $45, Station Wagons at $50, SUVs at $55, and the eight-seat Mini Wagon at $65. Everything is automatic with air conditioning. Insurance is not included in those rates, contrary to what several listings around the web say: it is an optional $5 a day. That is still the cheapest insurance in this directory, where the same cover runs $8 to $10 elsewhere, so the honest comparison is favourable. Add insurance to the entry car and Junie's is $45 a day, which lands exactly level with Andy's at the same terminal once their $10 insurance is added to their $35 rate. The two are more evenly matched than the headline numbers suggest. The extras, which are cheap. Child seats are $5 a day, in infant, high-back booster and backless booster, undercutting the $8 elsewhere at the ferry. Beach chairs and umbrellas are available, which matters more than it sounds given that only three of Anguilla's thirty-three beaches have chair rentals on site. A temporary Anguillian driver's licence is issued to each driver, $15 for 72 hours or $25 for three months, which are the Inland Revenue fees rather than a markup. Two things regulars mention. The team speaks English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, which is not a gimmick on an island whose ferry arrives from the French side of St. Martin and whose visitors come off the same boats as the European traffic through SXM. And if your luggage does not fit in the car you booked when you land at Blowing Point, Junie and the team will escort you to your villa or resort with the rest of it. No other operator in this directory offers anything like that, and it is the kind of thing that tells you what sort of business it is.