Car Hire Excess Insurance - What Is It For?

If you are among the many Britons hiring a car in Europe this summer or next, you are probably already familiar with the practice of imposing an excess on any insurance package that comes with the rented vehicle.
 
Given the stakes involved, it is worth looking at this practice in a little more detail:
 
The Stakes:

- According to a report in the Express newspaper on the 5th of May 2015, some car rental companies – in Spain in particular – have raised the amount of excess payable to a mind-blowing £1,800.

- With you, the customer, taking on such a giant’s share of the risk, the cost to the insurer is thereby minimised and the opportunity for the car rental company to persuade you to buy excess insurance is maximised.

- In the European car hire insurance racket, the latter gives rental companies the chance to exploit customers’ quite natural concern about liability for paying nearly £2,000 in excess fees to sell overpriced excess insurance – for which the hire car operator may typically receive a handsome profit in commissions.

- Such are the incentives for European car rental companies that the more unscrupulous amongst them adopt extremely hard-sell tactics – sometimes insisting that the excess insurance they are offering is mandatory.

- All this for policies that are typically less comprehensive than you might expect, given that they typically exclude damage to certain parts of the vehicle, such as the roof, underside, wheels, tyres and windows.

- What may be less well known, however, is that it does not need to be this way.

- You might steal a march on these European hire car operators by instead coming to a specialist insurance provider – such as us here at Bettersafe – in order to arrange fully comprehensive excess insurance before you so much as leave your own front door.

- Our own research shows that the cost of excess cover bought from a hire car company may represent more than 80% of the daily cost of renting the vehicle – our policies are a fraction of that price and have none of the exclusions that other excess insurance policies may incorporate.

- Not only are standalone car hire excess insurance policies available for cars rented in the UK and Europe but also further afield – if you are renting in North America or the Caribbean, for instance, you might want the added benefits of a full Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) and Supplemental Liability Insurance (SLI).

- If you are a frequent traveller and find yourself hiring cars in different parts of the world at various times during the course of the year, you might want to consider an annual, multi-trip policy that provides excess protection whenever and how every often you hire a car.

- European car hire insurance, in particular, might seem to have more than its fair share of pitfalls, especially when it comes to arranging cover for what are typically very substantial excess charges. The problems are compounded still further by the excess protection products which car rental companies may try to sell.
 
The safe and economical solution, therefore, may be to arrange your excess cover entirely separately from an independent UK-based insurance provider.