When you hire a car the type of insurance that you need falls into two categories. The first is the insurance that you need to cover other people and their property for damage that you may cause them whilst you are driving the hire car. This is known as Third Party Insurance. The second is the cover you need for damage to the car itself. This is known as a Collision Damage Waiver or CDW insurance policy.
CDW insurance can also be known as Loss Damage Waiver. When you take out a CDW policy you are in fact waiving or surrendering your responsibility for paying for the repair or replacement of the hire car.
Very few CDW policies will provide complete cover and you may find that you are still liable to pay substantial amounts in the event that the car is damaged and has to be repaired or replaced.
This is because CDW policies normally come with an excess. The excess defines an amount of money which your insurer would expect you to pay toward the cost of repairs to the hire car before the policy would come into play. So if your policy stipulated an excess of 500 pounds and the damage to the car came to 600 pounds you would have to find 500 pounds and your policy would pay the remaining 100. If the cost of the damage was 400 pounds you would have to pay for it all.
Excesses can be fairly substantial. Amounts anywhere between 500 and 1500 pounds are not uncommon.
There may also be exclusions on a CDW policy. These exclusions refer to areas of the car, typically the windscreen, roof, tyres and undercarriage, which the policy won’t cover if they get damaged. The repair of these items can be expensive particularly when you have no control over who carries them out or at what cost.
The good news is that you can buy additional insurance to remove or reduce the excess. This excess insurance can also be called CDW excess or Super CDW.
If you buy collision damage waiver insurance from the car hire company, it will almost certainly come with a high excess and the top up insurance they may offer to reduce this excess will be expensive. Even then you may still be liable to pay for any damage to those ‘excluded’ items.
There are other sources of CDW insurance for rental cars. These are independent insurance providers in the market place most of whom have internet sites where you can quickly and easily get a quote for your hire car insurance needs.
A large number of these advertise at insurance4carrental.com website – Details Here (CDW / Collision Damage Waiver also applies when you hire a Motorhome or Van) There are daily policies for car, motorhome and van hire and annual policies for car hire.
Even if you have hired a car with insurance included in the price you can still buy your top up or excess insurance from a specialist provider. You may even find that the policies sold by these suppliers will also cover as standard, the items excluded by many of the policies sold by the car hire companies.
Nobody likes to spend more than they have to for CDW insurance so it may be worthwhile to check out the independent suppliers. You may be surprised at how much you could save by going direct to an independent insurance company.
Part Source insurance4carhire
No comments:
Post a Comment