Car hire insurance has its own vocabulary that may at times seem intimidating and confusing. One such term that you may have seen mentioned in ‘the small print’ is Car Hire Excess Waiver. What exactly does this mean?
Car hire excess waiver is, in effect, a form of insurance that could save you a lot of money if you are unlucky enough to have an accident with a rented car.
You may perhaps think that the rented car you’re driving came with insurance included in the price or that you purchased insurance with it from the rental company. Why do you need more?
Getting the right protection
The brutal fact of life is that your rental car’s insurance provided by the rental company is probably limited in several respects. One of these is that it carries ‘excess’ – that is a financial amount you will need to pay as a mandatory contribution towards the ‘first part’ of any claims. If that sounds rather complicated, in reality it’s quite simple, if potentially expensive. The typical rental company’s insurance on a hired car will set an excess on the policy of between 500 and 1500 pounds. If you have an accident resulting in damage valued at 2000 pounds and your policy carries 1000 pounds excess, then you will have to pay the first 1000 pounds of the 2000 and the rental company’s insurance will pay the rest. If the damage amounts to say 500 pounds, then you will need to pay it all.
This may not have been quite what you had in mind when you took out the rental company’s insurance in the first place. So is there anything you can do to protect yourself against ‘excess’ risks?
The answer is ‘yes’. Car hire excess waiver is a facility or form of insurance that the rental company may offer you. This will, for an additional cost, allow you to remove or reduce (i.e. ‘waive’) the excess from the policy. The bad news is that insurance like this sold by the rental companies is often several times more expensive than equivalent or even superior insurance sold on the open insurance market by specialist providers of rental car insurance.
Annual or daily cover
These companies also offer car hire excess insurance that means if the rental company charge you excess following an accident, you will be able to claim this back from your own insurance. These policies also have the significant attraction of being sold to you as a policyholder for a period of days (or annually) rather than just for an individual car rental. This means you can use them to protect you against excess charges from car rental companies throughout the period of your policy and for any cars rented (with the exception of certain specialist vehicles such as sports cars).
Purchasing car hire excess waiver insurance from a specialist provider of hire car insurance could save you a lot of money initially and even more money should you be unlucky enough to have an accident in a hire car. You can find these specialist companies on the Internet and it may be worth checking them out.
Tags: Car Hire Excess Waiver