If you’re looking to go abroad in the near future and think you might be interested in hiring a car, you’re going to need to consider how you’re going to arrange the insurance. In many countries, standard insurance packages are lumped in with the car deal, but this isn’t always the case – and even if it is, there are often a great many additional policies available (such as day to say or annual car hire excess insurance) that can confuse the average buyer. How do you know which ones are worth buying, and which aren’t?
Generally speaking, these additional policies fall under the umbrella term of supplementary liability insurance, or SLI, and work as a means of lowering the excess that is attached to your rental car insurance policy. The excess on a hire car works in much the same way as an excess on any other type of insurance – if it’s set at, for example, £150 and the repair bill after an accident comes to £200, you’ll be liable for the first £150 and the insurance company will pay the remaining £50.
One of the downsides of renting a car abroad is that the excess attached to the basic insurance policy you sign up for is likely to be much higher than it might be back in the UK, for your usual automobile. It’s not unusual to find excesses on policies that run to between £800 and £1000, and sometimes even more than that – a sum of money that could cause a real financial burden for many people.
Car hire excess insurance (or, more specifically, collision damage waiver insurance) will allow you to shrink your excess to more manageable levels; indeed, if you get a ‘Super CDW’ insurance policy, you could even cut it down altogether. The downside to this approach is that it’s often very expensive – even though CDW cover might only come to a few pounds a day, that’s on top of the cost of renting a car in the first place, and as such it might build up to a considerable amount of money over the course of even a short holiday.
One way to beat this is to book annual car hire excess insurance online before you even set foot on a plan. Annual car hire excess insurance allows you to book an SLI policy that will last for a full twelve months, and will cover you for any hire car you rent in that time. As such, it’s especially useful for people who plan on going on holiday and renting a car more than once in that time, or people who have to go abroad and rent cars for business fairly regularly. While it’s also possible to book daily SLI policies online, annual car hire excess insurance is likely to work out cheaper for at least some people, and so it’s important to do a comparison. Either way, you’ll likely find savings by booking online, freeing up some of your hard earned cash and allowing you to have the peace of mind that comes with car hire excess insurance without costing you a fortune.