Probably the most common form of insurance for car rentals is daily car hire insurance. The insurance costs are quoted as a daily rate, which is then multiplied by the number of days of the rental.
For many rentals today, car hire insurance is bought from the car hire company. For each of the components of the insurance, Collision Damage Waiver, Third Party, CDW Excess and so on, the basic rate is multiplied by the number of days of the rental and totalled up to give a total cost for the car insurance.
Buying daily car hire insurance like this happens every time you rent a car and accept or purchase your car insurance from the rental company because the insurance relates to the rental and not to you.
You can also buy daily car hire insurance from one of the independent insurance providers who specialise in the car hire insurance market and this differs from the insurance bought from car hire companies in a number of ways. The first is that the insurance belongs to you as the policyholder. So while you may have bought it to drive one rental car only, you could typically use the same policy for another rental provided you did not exceed the daily duration of the policy.
Comprehensive protection
There are, however, other benefits of this type of insurance not the least being that it is normally much cheaper than the equivalent level of cover purchased from the car hire company. You may also find that the policies offered by the rental companies quite often exclude several areas of the rented car from their damage protection cover – typically the wheels, tyres, roof, undercarriage and windows. Any damage to those areas and the rental company will charge your credit card with the repair costs even if you have their insurance.
By contrast, the specialist providers of insurance will normally include cover for these areas in their policies.
Some car rental companies can offer what seem to be really good rental deals if you take one of their insurance included options. The basic insurance offered in these cases may not be very comprehensive though and you may feel that you would like to buy some additional excess or top-up insurance. Even in these cases you can still benefit from the cheaper insurance on offer from the specialists as you can buy your top-up and excess insurance from them and not from the car hire company.
Terms and conditions
To give a specific example, if you have an accident in the rental car and sustain damage to an area not covered by the rental company’s policy, then the car hire company may charge the cost of the repair to your credit card. You would then simply have to claim on your personal daily car hire insurance policy for reimbursement.
As with all types of insurance there are terms and conditions attached to daily car hire insurance policies sold by the specialist providers. This type of policy will not usually cover rentals of very high value, sports or vintage cars You may also find that your policy will not cover you if you want to rent a car within 150 miles of you own address.
A final point is that the independent specialists also offer annual insurance policies. These may be more convenient than daily car hire insurance if you know in advance that you are going to rent a car on more than one occasion in the course of a year.
Tags: Daily Car Hire Insurance