You may be looking for a cheaper alternative to the daily car hire excess insurance offered by the car hire companies. If this is the case, then you may find it useful to have a look at the Internet sites of some of the independent insurance providers who offer exactly this type of insurance cover.
They offer this type of product because of the way that car hire insurance works.
Renting cars
Typically when you rent cars, there are two issues relating to insurance.
The first is if you injure someone, or damage their property, while you are in control of the hired car. This is called Third Party insurance and in the UK where this type of cover is required by law, it provides unlimited cover. This means that no matter the level of costs or damages awarded against you, your third party policy will typically cover them to 100% of their value (up to a provider’s set limit of course).
In some other countries, cover may be limited and in places like the USA there may be no third party cover at all. In these cases you may consider buying Supplemental Liability Insurance (SLI) to increase the amount your policy would pay out to a level more in line with what a court could award. Daily car hire excess insurance does not apply to third party cover.
Where it does apply though, is to the second component of car hire insurance known as Collision Damage Waiver (CDW). Collision damage waiver covers the costs of damage to the hire car itself.
As supplied by the car hire companies and in common with many other types of insurance, collision damage waiver will usually carry an excess. The excess is an amount of money that you agree to pay towards any claim and can range from between £500 and £1600 - quite a lot to find if you do happen to have an accident.
Reducing the excess
Daily car hire excess insurance is optional cover that you buy to remove or reduce the excess attached to your collision damage waiver cover. It is available from the car hire companies but it may be expensive. So it is here that you may find that the prices of cover supplied by the independent Internet based car insurance specialists can be cheaper.
To benefit from the potential savings, you may need to buy daily car hire excess insurance in advance of your rental. You can do this very easily over the Internet. Your policy will then cover you and any other named drivers for your rental. You may find that you have to be the lead driver on the rental agreement.
If you then have an accident in your rental car, the car hire company may charge your credit card with your portion of any repair costs (i.e. the excess) but you would then simply just have to claim this amount back from you daily car hire excess policy.
That’s only part of the story though because in addition to covering the excess, you may find that many excess insurance policies bought from the independent specialists also provide cover for parts of the hire car generally excluded from standard CDW cover.
So damage to the windscreen, tyres, roof and undercarriage (all typically excluded from standard car rental company cover) may be covered at no extra cost by your daily car hire excess insurance - which has to be good news!