Renting a car can be quite stressful especially if you don’t do it very often. If you want to relax and enjoy the drive, then the only thing you can do is get a full blown, zero excess car hire insurance that removes all the risk from you. In this article I will explain what your car hire excess insurance options are and how to get the best deal for yourself.
What Is Car Hire Excess Insurance
Most car rental companies set an excess in case you return the car damaged. This means that with the basic car hire insurance package you are liable to cover the first €500 or €1,000 (or more) of the cost of repair. The amount depends on each rental firm, so check the small print.
You can reduce this car hire insurance excess to zero by purchasing, guess what, car hire excess insurance!
The car hire excess insurance costs a little extra, sometimes more than the car hire itself. However, paying for zero excess car hire insurance is still much cheaper than what the car hire firm will charge you in case of an accident.
You have many options to reduce the excess to zero, such as buying from a third party insurer, or directly with the car hire firm. Anyway, I will explain these various car hire insurance options in this article, so read on!
Purchasing Car Hire Excess Insurance
I have had the misfortune of reversing into a lamp post (outside my own house of all places!) smashing the back light and the bumper. Because I had no insurance the car hire firm charged me €250 in excess, which I was very annoyed about at the time but I had nobody else to blame but myself.
Tip: Read my article about avoiding upsell tactics at the airport pick-up desk
On the flipside, I once rented a car at Houston Airport from Avis and initially I had no insurance but then the clerk convinced me to get it at the car hire pick up desk. In retrospect that was the best decision ever! As I was parking up at a curb in a small Texan town, I overdid it and nearly ripped the bumper off! Fortunately the insurance covered everything so there was no need to worry at all!
Another time in my early “rookie” car hire days I rented a car in Australia with no insurance whatsoever. The girl at the car rental pick up desk was very helpful in explaining the risks so thankfully I listened to her and took out the excess insurance for $6.38/day which wasn’t that hugely expensive.
I couldn’t thank her enough about 20 minutes later! As I was driving along the road a big truck drove past me and a small rock hit my windshield – cracking it all the way to the middle! I was lucky it did not explode in my face when I was driving on the main road at 60mph! Fortunately the insurance covered it so it cost me nothing all and my deposit was released in full when I dropped the car off.
The moral of the story: you need insurance but not just any!
Third Party vs Direct Car Hire Insurance
I would recommend getting the zero excess car hire insurance to give you peace of mind during the car rental period. How much it will cost depends on where you get it. You can get insurance directly through the rental firm, or at the aggregator website like Holiday Autos or Argus Car Hire or by using a third party firm.
My advice until early in 2018 was to get zero excecc cover from an external insurance firm because they tend to be the cheapest. Also, often their coverage is much wider than the car hire company’s insurance or the aggregator firms’.
When you turn up at the car hire desk they might offer your zero excess insurance but then they will explain it doesn’t cover the underside, the tires, loss of keys and a list of other things. You will need to pay another pile of money for those things as well. By getting a third party zero excess insurance policy they will likely cover everything!
Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with the firm I had been using until March 2018 so now I am tending towards just getting a full blown insurance with the car hire firm directly. It will cost you more but at least you won’t be pushed around by the car hire firm, the third party insurance company and the website where you’ve booked the car.
Good to know: some booking sites like Netflights often include the zero excess car hire policy in the booking at no extra cost!
Here is what happened to me in March 2018: I booked a car on the Holiday Autos website in Marrakesh with Thrifty and insured myself with Worldwide Insure. Worldwide Insure is a third party car hire excess insurance company based in the UK.
Unfortunately Thrifty decided to completely rip me off by saying I returned the car damaged and took my £1,259 deposit in full! At first I was very angry but then I thought about my car hire excess insurance and contacted Worldwide Insure. Now low and behold, they said they won’t pay out until I provided lots of documents which I had no direct access to.
Providing Proof of Car Hire Damage
Worldwide Insure wanted me to show proof of damage, repair invoices, photographs and receipts and the whole monty! I could not believe they were putting up all these barriers to paying out – and unfortunately I have since found out that several of their customers were left out of pocket during the years.
So for about 6 weeks I was going back and forth between Worldwide Insure, Thrifty, Holiday Autos and the Hertz Head Office but nobody was helping at all. Thrifty was simply not responding (read my full review), Holiday Autos said they are just the facilitator of the booking and Worldwide Insure kept sending me to Thrifty to get more proof. Obviously they did not want to pay out the huge deposit.
Instead, they recommended I contact my credit card company to get a chargeback! I just did not want to believe it! Why on earth should I get their insurance if their best advice is to contact my credit card company for a chargeback?
Anyhow, in the end I did contact my card company and they gave me a full chargeback but in the end Hertz also fully refunded me saying they made a mistake and there was no damage to the car!
I then had to go back to my credit card company and ask them to take the money back! The worst is, a week later Holiday Autos sent me a message saying Thrifty contacted them with proof the car was damaged! I found it pretty incredible that Hertz, the owner of Thrifty tells me there was a mistake and no damage was made to the car but then two weeks later Thrifty sends me a message with supposed photo proof of the damage.
Now look at the images at the end of the article and tell me if you can see any damage? All I can see is the reflection of the camera’s flash in the car’s door and bonnet!
So would I recommend Worldwide Insure now? Not really! It is an absolute pain in the ass working with them and I got no money out of them! I feel like I’ve wasted my £50 annual insurance fee on them. I guess I got what I paid for: nothing!
Car Hire Insurance Explained – A Bit More
At the time of pick up the car hire firm will block about €1,500 (or more) on your credit card and if you return the car damaged they will keep this money.
They will give you a receipt which you then need to send to your insurance company, explaining what happened. You also need to get a damage report, photos of the damage and a long list of other things which will be explained in your insurance policy.
If you’ve had zero excess insurance with the online aggregator or with a third party insurance company like Worldwide Insure, they will process your claim and send you a check for the deposit amount, refunding your excess in full.
I have done this a couple of times and it works, but apparently only if the money they need to pay out is a small amount. I once got like £95 paid out and another time about £75. When I was claiming nearly £1,300 they basically made me run for my money and paid nothing out.
In contrast, when I had direct insurance with the hire company all I had to do was sign the documents on return and that’s it. No running around the block for 5-6 weeks afterwards and providing dozens of pages of documents as proof. True, it will cost you a lot more, sometimes more than the cost of the car hire, but at least you know you just need to drop the car off and that’s it.
Conclusion
Whatever you do or wherever you get the zero excess insurance from my advice is this: get it! It will give you peace of mind and the assurance that no matter what you will get your deposit back. Hiring a car is fun but it can become very expensive very quick, even for damaging the car with a small scratch alone! Imagine if I did not have insurance at all when I returned the car to Thrifty? They would have just laughed in my face and charge me £1,259 and I would have had no recourse whatsoever!
Final advice before the photos: always return the car clean! At least, if nothing else, take it to a basic wash at the petrol station so that there is no argument the car hire firm “found” scratches under the dust! It’s happened to me, and I was very pissed off about!
Thrifty Car Hire Photos from Marrakesh
And here are the photos of the car I hired in Marrkaesh – tell me if you can make anything out! I can only imagine sending these photos to Worldwide Insure and them telling me they are no use and I would need more proof! What is also possible the idiot driver damaged the car when he took it to the car wash and blamed it on me!
I honestly looked after this car like it was my baby as I could see the manager was very proud of it – then this is the treatment I got. I’ve said it many times before but this was definitely the last time I went anywhere near Thrifty!
To be fair to Worldwide Insure, the company owner was very helpful when I contacted him. He replied to all my emails and sent me this explanation why the case was taking longer than usual:
Kevin Bonner-Williams: “We have confirmation that claims contacted the hire firm last Friday, urging them to provide evidence of the damage. They will be contacting them again if they do not hear from them by mid-week and hope by this pressure they will receive what they need to conclude the claim.
The Claims Department will sort this out one way or another, that I am pretty sure of.
We do not like nor accept that any insured should lose out due to the poor or possibly fraudulent attitude of a car hire firm.
These firms can make a large amount of money by charging for damage to a car but then never having it repaired and if they can, getting away with charging someone else for the same damage. This is not unusual so it is in the best interests of any person hiring a car, to ensure they photo it on return as well as when they hire. I did just that in Jersey a couple of weeks ago, just to be safe.”
Anyhow, in the end my annual insurance with Worldwide Insure cost nearly £60 and brought me no peace of mind, but it might work in other cases. On Trustpilot they are rated at 91/100 so most customers seem to be happy with them.
