Cancellation insurance for car hire

Although my wife and I have rented cars on many occasions over the years, we have never had to cancel a booking at the last minute.

I had booked car hire via holiday autos for a visit between the 7th February and 10th February 2010. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, she had to cancel the booking about 3 hours before she was due to collect the car.


I telephoned holiday autos and although, the car hire was immediately cancelled, it will cost £25.00. This means we will get about £8.00 back!


Their very helpful representative said that we should have paid for their cancewlation waiver insurance. This is seems like a great idea if you have to cancel like this. I have now booked again for her and paid the £2.00+ insurance for the next rental. I think I will always do this in future for a low cost rental as it would not have been worth claiming on the travel insurance as the claim would have been lower than the excess.

The following information comes from the holiday autos website:
Cancellation waiver protection
For just £5.50 per rental week, holiday autos will waive your liability to pay any cancellation charges if you are unable to honour your booking prior to the collection date. If you wish to purchase this contractual waiver charge, you must do so at the time of booking.


I also see that holiday autos has a "price match guarantee".

They say" If you find the exact same car offered by any other independent car rental company at a cheaper rate, we will do our very best to match it. Our price match guarantee only applies to quotes made with operators within the same country. You may use our price match guarantee up until the day of departure.

Your collection point will affect your quote. You cannot compare prices for an airport pick up and a non-airport pick up.

We will need to confirm the availability and conditions of the lower rate to make sure an accurate comparison has been made. We will do this straight away but it may take a few minutes. You can hold the line or, if you prefer, we will call you back.

Our price match guarantee does not apply to promotional offers and is not valid on van hire or prestige cars."

To find out more about holiday autos follow this link:
http://www.holidayautos.co.uk/cgi-bin/liveweb.sh/QSearch.w?ctryref=GBR&lang=EN&aff=xjeffreymilnerltd