Most insurance for car rentals comes with excess but it is possible to remove or at least reduce it by buying additional excess waiver insurance.
Excesses can be a substantial size. Amounts of between 500 and 1500 pounds are not uncommon. So you would potentially need to find significant amounts of money if you were involved in an accident while driving your rental car and had to contribute to the repair costs.
It may be worth noting that while by law in the UK third party cover is unlimited, which means that there is no upper limit on the amount that the insurance will pay out if you injure someone else or damage their property, there can still be an excess on third party cover.
Car rental companies will always offer you the chance to buy excess waiver insurance to reduce the excesses that may exist on their basic collision damage waiver and third party policy cover.
You may find that if you accept the prices offered by the car rental company, the overall cost of your rental increases dramatically. They typically quote you a daily rate which can sound ok, but when multiplied by the number of days of your rental, the costs can really start to mount up.
You may still even be left with some excess to pay and it is very unlikely that the excess insurance offered by the car rental company would include damage to those areas of the car normally excluded from most collision damage waiver cover - the windscreen, roof, tyres or undercarriage.
There is though an alternative to buying your excess waiver insurance from the car rental company. There are specialist insurance providers who offer this type of cover and you may find that their prices are much lower than those of the car rental company. Their excess cover may also include as standard those ‘exclusions’ in other policies.
They can offer you all the excess cover you need for rentals at home or abroad although they don’t cover vintage, sports or very high value vehicles.
These specialist providers can offer cover on a daily rate basis for the duration of your rental or they can also sell you an annual policy.
An annual policy can be used again and again in the course of a single year. It is not tied in to any car rental agreement but belongs to you the policyholder. So if you know that you are going to need to rent a car on more that one occasion in the coming 12 months then it may be worthwhile looking at what these companies can offer.
In fact even if you don’t have plans to rent more than once it may still be more economical to buy insurance from the specialist.
With this type of policy the car rental company would charge the costs of any damage to the car to your credit card. You would then simply have to claim on your excess waiver insurance policy for full reimbursement.
Tags: Excess Waiver Insurance