portugal-car-rental-credit-card-issue

Check before you rent a car in Portugal — SEO guide site

Static, multilingual guide that catches travellers in the planning phase — before they pay for a booking — and warns them about the traps they don’t know about yet: the physical-credit-card deposit requirement, deposit amounts (€1,200–1,900), rubber clauses and no-show cancellation terms. The debit-card problem is the strongest topic, but the site also serves credit-card holders.

Main features:

Languages

19 mutations targeting European countries where credit cards are uncommon (debit-card-first markets), plus English as the primary SEO language:

en (root, x-default) · cs sk de pl hu nl fr it da fi lt lv et ro bg hr sl uk

Each language lives at /portugal/{lang}/, English at /portugal/. All pages cross-link via hreflang and are listed in sitemap.xml.

Per-company pages are generated for every language that has a content/companies.{lang}.json file (currently en and cs — brief phase 1; add a file to add a language).

Stack

Verification log (freshness signal)

/updates/ (every language) lists dated entries of when the rental companies’ terms were actually re-checked — a genuine, honest freshness signal for search engines, not a manufactured one.

To add an entry, append to data/updates.json:

{ "date": "2026-07-12", "type": "verified", "vendors": ["goldcar", "centauro"], "note": "" }

Updating rental-company conditions

  1. Edit data/vendors.json (acceptance flags, T&C link, verified date).
  2. Edit the per-vendor notes/verdicts in each locales/*.json (table.vendors.{id}).
  3. Bump dateModified in site.config.json, run node build.js, push.

A locale missing a key falls back to the English string and the build prints a warning, so partial updates never break the site.

Domain & path prefix

The site lives at rentwithdebit.com/portugal/ — the domain has no country in its name on purpose, so future countries (Spain, other airports — see brief phase 3) can each get their own top-level prefix (/spain/, etc.) without breaking this one. rentwithdebit.com/ itself is a noindex redirect stub to /portugal/, generated by the build.

site.config.json drives this:

One-time manual steps (outside this repo, need repo/DNS access):

  1. At your DNS provider, point the apex domain to GitHub Pages: four A records to 185.199.108.153, 185.199.109.153, 185.199.110.153, 185.199.111.153 (add AAAA records too if you want IPv6). If you’d rather use www.rentwithdebit.com, a CNAME record to michalprouza.github.io works instead.
  2. After the first deploy with DNS propagated, check Settings → Pages — once GitHub verifies the domain, tick Enforce HTTPS.

Editorial rules