Many people hiring a car automatically take the car rental cover offered by the car rental company. This could be because many rentals these days are sold with insurance included in the price, simply out of convenience or because that’s how they’ve always done it.
So even if they’ve shopped around to find the best car rental deal available, some people may spend more on insurance than is necessary simply due to convenience or habit. What’s worse is that some people may not even realise that when it comes to car rental cover there is an alternative to the car rental company’s insurance.
If your rental agreement has insurance included the level of cover that it offers may fall far short of leaving you fully insured. Many Collision Damage Waiver policies that come as standard actually carry large excess clauses. The excess is the amount you could be liable to pay if the rental car is damaged and needs to be repaired and can be as much as 1500 pounds. Obviously if the cost of the damage is less than the excess you only pay the actual cost.
Either way though the costs involved could be substantial especially if you bear in mind that you have no control over where or by whom the repairs are carried out. The rental companies are unlikely to shop around to find the cheapest garage to do the repairs.
In addition to the excess, a number of key elements of the car will also be excluded completely from the cover and any damage to these areas, the windscreen, tyres, undercarriage and roof will have to be paid for by you.
The car rental company will be more than happy to sell you additional top-up insurance at a daily rate to reduce your Excess liability. For a very short rental of a day or so, this may not seem like a lot of money but for longer rentals it can all mount up to a substantial sum.
It may make financial sense to shop around for car rental cover and you may be surprised at the savings, which could result. Even if you have a rental deal, which includes insurance, and are only looking for top-up cover for excesses, you can still buy this from one of the independent specialists in car rental cover. These companies can provide as little or as much cover as you want.
The policies that they sell are not just based on a daily rate for the duration of the rental. They also sell annual policies so you can you use the same policy for a number of car rentals in the course of a year and you are not tied in any way to a particular car rental company. These annual car rental cover policies may not to be available for specialist vehicles such as vintage or sports models, or those of very high value. However, provided you are looking for something a bit more ‘ordinary’ then an annual policy could make sense for you particularly if you have plans to rent a car on a number of occasions over the course of a year.
Tags: car rental cover