Luxury Car Rental — Alghero Fertilia Airport

Fertilia is an airport built on a human scale, and that works entirely in your favour: only minutes pass between the baggage carousel and the exit, and one of our team is waiting for you in the arrivals area with the car already positioned in the car park facing the terminal. No shuttle buses, no queue at a rental desk: you share your flight number when you book, and we monitor the actual landing time ourselves, so the meeting works even if your flight comes in early or late.

The paperwork is prepared before you leave home, through our WhatsApp concierge or the enquiry form, so all that remains on the spot are the signatures and a walkaround of the car: controls, driving modes, the roof if you have chosen a convertible. Requirements and conditions are provided at the quotation stage. At the end of the trip you return the car to the same point, with a buffer agreed before your check-in; and if your itinerary finishes somewhere else, with 27 destinations and 3 airports served across Sardinia we can just as easily collect the car in Olbia, in Cagliari or outside your villa.

Alghero is the first temptation: 11 km, twenty minutes or so, and you are already hunting for a parking spot beneath the Catalan walls. On the way in you pass the pine grove of Maria Pia, its juniper-covered dunes right beside the carriageway — plenty of our guests take their first swim before they have even checked in. Le Bombarde lies in the same direction, a handful of minutes further on, while the bay of Porto Conte and the Capo Caccia lookout — with the staircase down to Neptune's Grotto — are about half an hour away along the SP55, one of the most scenic roads in the north-west.

Heading north, Stintino and La Pelosa are around fifty minutes away across the open country of the Nurra; Castelsardo, its old town stacked on a crag above the Gulf of Asinara, is roughly an hour. And if you want to open the trip with the most celebrated road in the area, the SP105 coast road to Bosa begins practically at Alghero itself: forty kilometres of cliff and open sea that turn your first afternoon in Sardinia into a permanent memory.

Because this is the gateway to the Riviera del Corallo: you land inside your destination, not halfway across the island. If the north-west is your plan — Alghero, Stintino, Asinara, the coastline towards Bosa — starting here spares you hours of transfer and puts your wheels straight onto the roads you came for. The route network is at its richest between spring and early autumn, which also happens to be the finest driving window: May, June and September bring warm seas and coast roads free of the August traffic.

There is a less obvious advantage too: Fertilia stays calm even at the height of summer, far removed from the congestion of the big tourist hubs. Collecting the car remains a fluid affair even in mid-August, and within ten minutes of stepping out of the terminal you are on open roads between farmland and sea, with no urban crawl to work through. For a top-tier rental, where time is the real currency, it is the ideal point of departure.

If the Bosa coast road and long beach days are the goal, start with the roof down: a Mercedes-AMG SL 63 pairs a fabric soft top and all-wheel drive with a V8 that is at its very best through the wide sweepers of the SP105. If you are thinking bigger — perhaps an itinerary that takes in the whole of the island's north — a Bentley Continental GT is the better travelling companion: covering distance in the hush of an English drawing room is a luxury you appreciate anew every day on roads like these.

For families and full boots there is the fast, elegant route of the Audi RS6 Avant Performance: estate-car space with supercar pace, perfect for alternating beaches, hill villages and dinners out. Before you book, our guide to the requirements for renting a luxury car in Italy is worth a read. Then message the WhatsApp concierge with your dates and flight number: check availability, and the car will be waiting for you at arrivals.