Car hire ‘super CDW’ cover: your policy should be to avoid this rip-off By Patrick Collinson was the headline in The Guardian on Saturday 9th April.
Once again there were warning on the problems of renting a car. It starts of saying "Rental companies are using ever more desperate tactics to force you into buying their wildly expensive “super CDW” insurance. The reason? Lots of people have woken up to this holiday rip-off and bought annual cover from the likes of icarhireinsurance or insurance4carhire instead. Nearly all the profit hire companies make comes from the extras, and when you don’t buy they get frantic."
First of all Patrick tells the story of his brother arriving at Glasgow airport with family. They had booked a large family car a Ford Galaxy. The company did not have such a vehicle and were offered a Citroen C3 Picasso which is about £10,000 cheaper on the market if you want to buy one. Next came the hard sell on the excess insurance.
Although his brother had an annual car hire excess policy costing around £40 this was not good enough as the car hire company wanted to immediately debit £1,250 from his credit card. He did not have enough credit for this and refused to let his wife use her card. The only solution was that he had to pay £12.50 a day - the car hire company's price for their preferred insurance product.
This is so typical, however from personal experience, many car hire companies don't take the excess fee (£1,250 in this case) off your card them, they just want to be able to do it.
Patrick also pointed out that the policy you often buy from a car hire excess company, does not cover additional damage like tyres, under carriage, wheels and windscreens.
This blog has been around for many years now and together with the insurance4carrental.com website we have featured so many similar reports like this. Will it ever change? Read The Guardian article here
No comments:
Post a Comment