What is Car Rental Excess Insurance?
Car rental excess insurance provides cover for the excess charge imposed by a car rental company when your hire vehicle is involved in an accident, damaged or stolen.
When you pick up your rental car, you will be asked if you want to take out additional insurance. If you decide not to take the excess reduction insurance and the car is damaged you will have to pay to cover the cost of the damage up to a pre-determined amount – this is known as an excess charge. To reduce this excess cover to $0 or a smaller figure, eg $500, you need to take out excess reduction insurance, sometimes referred to as additional car insurance or Super Damage Waiver Insurance by the car hire companies.
Rather than adding the cost of car hire excess insurance to your car hire cost, you can have car hire excess cover as part of a travel insurance policy at a much lower rate.
Car and Campervan Rental Insurance Excess Options
When I hire a car I have found the most economical way to cover car rental excess insurance is to buy a seperate travel insurance policy that includes car rental excess insurance cover.
Example – I regularly hire a Hertz car in Brisbane. Rather than pay the Hertz Super Damage Waiver Insurance, I have the option of purchasing a Travel Insurance Policy for Australian domestic travel. See below for an example of costs for a 7 day hire:
- Hertz Super Damage Waiver 7 days @ $46.00/day = $322.00
- NIB Travel Insurance Australian Domestic Policy 7 Days (age 55 years), including TIDD Member’s discount: $74.94
In this example the Travel Insurance Australian Domestic Policy is far cheaper, and you get other policy benefits with the Travel Insurance policy such as cancellation costs, theft of personal items, medical costs etc.
With NIB policies a level of car hire excess cover is included with their Domestic and International Comprehensive and Annual Multi Trip plans (the amount of cover depends on the policy purchased).
Travel Insurance Discounts, ABN 70 659 650 230 is a distributor of nib Travel Services (Australia) Pty Ltd (nib), ABN 81 115 932 173, AFSL 308461 and receives a commission for nib products purchased through Travel Insurance Discounts. Travel Insurance Discounts acts as an agent for nib and not as your agent. Travel Insurance Discounts cannot give advice about nib products, and any factual information provided is not intended to imply a recommendation or opinion about nib products. Before you buy, please read the Product Disclosure Statement, Financial Services Guide and Target Market Determination (TMD) available from us. If you have a complaint about a nib product, see the Product Disclosure Statement for the complaints process. This insurance is underwritten by Pacific International Insurance Pty Ltd, ABN 83 169 311 193.