It’s very easy to just take the insurance offered to you by the car rental company. Whether they’ve included it in the price or try to sell it to you separately, it is tempting just to pay up. That would be a pity though, because you can save yourself a lot of money by looking at alternative sources for your car hire insurance and specifically things such as daily car hire excess insurance.
These opportunities for savings arise because of the nature of rental car insurance. The car rental company’s insurance policies will almost certainly come with something called excess. That is an amount of money you may have to contribute towards the cost of any claims after an accident and it is usually set between 500 and 1500 pounds.
It works like this – you may have paid for insurance but the policy may contain excess of (e.g.) 1000 pounds. You subsequently have an accident that results in damage of 1500 pounds to the car. The rental company’s insurance will pay for 500 pounds of that 1500 and you will receive an additional charge to your credit card of 1000 pounds for ‘excess’. If the claim totalled, say 750 pounds, you would have to pay it all.
If, like many, you don’t like the sound of that very much, then the car rental company will work very hard to try and persuade you to purchase what they may call top-up insurance. This means that, for additional sums of money, they will agree to reduce or remove the excess altogether. At that stage it’s easy just to say ‘yes’ simply for peace of mind and convenience. In fact the rental companies hope you’ll do just that because their insurance is often several times more expensive than the same insurance purchased elsewhere.
The good news is that you have an alternative. There are specialist providers of rental car insurance operating on the Internet. They offer a range of products and policies aimed at rental cars including daily car hire excess insurance. This operates on the basis that if you have an accident and the rental company charge excess to your credit card, you will be able to claim this back from your daily car hire excess insurance policy. This method of cover may be far cheaper than the equivalent offered by the rental company.
As the name suggests, the specialist providers can sell this insurance on a daily or annual basis. What this means is that for the life of the policy you would be covered for any vehicle rented, though you may need to check the conditions as some specialist vehicle types may be excluded. The costs and time savings here could be significant as no longer would you need to engage in debates and form-filling at the car collection desk every time you rent.
The specialist companies operating in the open insurance marketplace also offer many other insurance products that can complement or in some cases entirely replace the insurance offerings of the rental companies. So whether you’re looking for daily car hire excess insurance or for cheaper (and often better) alternatives to the other types of insurance offered by the car hire companies, the specialist providers may be worth checking out.