It is early August are you off on holiday? Got your car hire arranged?

4th August 2009 - We are in the height of the summer holiday season, but the weather is not too hot in the south of England today around 19 degrees and it is raining.

If you are starting your holiday later this week and are renting a car, do make sure you have taken out car hire excess insurance in advance. Car hire rental excess insurance is something that you may chose to ignore completely – particularly if you happen to like large and unpleasant financial shocks.

Such shocks are a very real possibility when hiring a car. That’s because the insurance provided by the hire company will, in all likelihood, contain a critical limitation. Buried somewhere in the small print will probably be a clause to the effect that the policy contains ‘excess’ and the excess is usually stated to be a financial amount between GBP £500 and GBP£1500!!

What you may be liable for:

If you have an accident that results in a claim then you will have to make a mandatory contribution to the cost – in other words the ‘excess amount’ that is sometimes also called the ‘first part’ of any claim. So if the policy excess is defined in the hire agreement to be £750 and you have an accident resulting in GBP£500’ worth of damage to the rented car, you should expect to see a charge to your credit card of the GBP£500 because it is below the policy’s stated excess. Should the damage be assessed at GBP£1500, you will get a charge to your credit card for the full £750 excess.

What is the best solution -

Take out a daily excess or annual excess policy. You can even take out one for family and partners and age group 75 -85.

Our website insurance4carrental.com is full of information, articles and links to well known providers like insurance4carhire.com and Questor. We do not sell the these products, just act as introducers under the terms of the UK FSA regulations.

So if you are off on holiday later this week, later this month or next month, arrange the car hire excess today. You don't want to leave that till the last minute.

If you are taking a holiday in the UK in the next few days, if you rent a convertable, make sure the roof closes it ok, it lookws like there is going to be a fair amount of rain about.