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Car Hire Excess

You may have considered yourself to be perfectly well protected by the insurance cover that invariably comes within the overall cost of the rental agreement – only to find that you face a bill for the excess charges included in that cover.

Since those excess charges might come to well over a thousand pounds, depending on the country you are in and the extent of damage to the vehicle, you may have felt it prudent to accept the hire company’s offer of insurance against such excess. In that decision, however, there are typically two major problems:

• You may find the cost of such car hire insurance high – a recent survey published by the Telegraph newspaper, for example, found that drivers are paying around £100 a week in excess insurance charges when they could be getting standalone cover and potentially paying less.
• There may be a number of areas of damage to the hire car – typically, the roof, underside, windows and tyres – which may still not be covered by the excess insurance, so you might find yourself having to pay for any damage to these.
  

The Alternative

The alternative is to give some thought to your car hire insurance before setting out on your trip.

At Bettersafe, for example, we are able to arrange not only excess insurance for your hire car but also additional protection for those parts of the world where you might find the question of arranging insurance for a rental car to be less than familiar than, say, in the UK or Europe.

In North or South America, for example, you may need the protection of a Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) to give you the same level of cover you might expect from the insurance that may come with the price of renting a car in other parts of the world.

A further element of cover that may be important to arrange for any hire car trip through the Americas is Supplemental Liability Cover (SLI). This significantly raises the level of cover to which you are entitled against claims from third parties for personal injury or loss or damage to their property. Claims of this nature may reach very significant proportions, so cover for settlements of up to $1 million is included in our policies.

Additional elements which you may not find in other forms of insurance for hire cars include cover for:

• Your claims against uninsured or under-insured motorists.
• Hit and run motorists with whom you have had an accident.

Adequately and economically insuring your rental car may prove confusing at times and might leave you with a very significant bill to settle if something goes wrong during your trip.

Excess insurance and the additional elements of the available cover are designed to keep you safely protected whether you are driving in the UK or Europe, the United States, or anywhere else in the world. It is important to note, however, that some areas may be excluded from cover such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Full details of these exclusions are available on our website and within the policy documentation.