Will Your Car Hire Be Expensive?

Although there is any number of websites offering a whole range of deals for the package you might want, disentangling the various components of the price might prove more difficult than it seems. The culprit is car hire insurance, which in the UK and Europe at least is typically included in the overall cost of renting the vehicle. Singling out that particular element of the cost, therefore, might be an issue.

What is almost certain to be an issue, too, is the cost of any car hire excess insurance you need to arrange as a defence against excesses on loss or damage to the vehicle, since these might run to as much as £1,500.

Yet both the amount of the excess you may be liable to pay and the cost of insuring against that risk, are likely to keep from you by the car rental company until the very last moment when you are checking out the car.

Car Hire Excess Insurance

It is this sleight of hand on the part of many rental companies, together with a certain ignorance on the part of customers which results in as many as 63% of them failing to arrange any type of excess insurance, according to a recently published Car Rental report by the Post Office.

One of the reasons for this, insists the Post Office report, is the very high cost of premiums for both excess insurance and additional cover for damage to parts of the vehicle otherwise excluded from a general hire car insurance – areas such as the roof and underside, windows, wheels and tyres.

The report claims that the cost of these additional items of insurance cost an average of £152 a week if you are hiring a car on Spain’s Costa del Sol, so more than doubling the advertised weekly rental of £124. If you want to add another driver to the car hire insurance, you are likely to pay a further £41.

Beating Those Additional Expenses

If you are already standing at the rental agency’s checkout desk when you learn about your liability for paying a very heft excess or the exclusion of certain types of damage, you might have little option but to pay the agent’s price for these extras.

But here at Bettersafe, we offer an altogether simpler solution – and one that is likely to cost rather less.

Buy our car hire excess insurance protection online before you even set out on your trip and this standalone policy is able to make sure that any excess you may be asked to pay at the end of your car rental period is promptly reimbursed once you make your claim to us when you arrive back home.

Not only does it protect your liability for paying such excess, but it also ensures that you remain covered for damage to otherwise excluded parts of the vehicle, such as the roof, undercarriage, windows, wheels and tyres.