MrsE

Hi

We are off on our reccie in less than 2 weeks and still haven't organised our car rental in Perth!!! It seems that every company I look up has horrendous Excesses! Anyone know of a good car rental company that doesn't have a huge excess please let me know as I really need to get this booked.

Thanks

Janna and Nick

You can buy car rental excess cover. Cheapest I have found is £40 and they cover up to £2000 excess.

Just do a google search and something should come up.

MrsE

Blimey - insurance to cover excess! Never heard of that before! Nice one! Thanks for that - I will look into it. Have you used it before or any car hire companies in Oz?

Dreamy

Car rental companies usually have two rates - one which has a standard insurance with a ginormous excess - this gives a 'cheap' price for them to advertise.. and then the 'real' rate which includes an insurance premium.

eg Thrifty - 'base price including standard insurance' $37.54 per day (for a family car) - excess $3300

If you want to reduce this to nil, it costs another $33 per day

I've found similar for other companies too.

daddyoconnor

Hi

We were in same boat. We are off to Qld in a few weeks and were looking at hire cars. The excess did seem very ...excessive....

I think if you look into it a bit further the hire companies seem to offer a Premium Protection cover (so you pay an extra $18 or thereabouts a day) and this reduces your excess by quite a bit. Its in with the added extras where you tick boxes for GPS, child car seat etc, etc.

However had I known about the Insurance Cover options I probably would have opted for this - sounds a lot cheaper than the way I have done it.

Anyway have a good time

louie

We used these people - http://www.insurance4carhire.com/. Way cheaper than paying the car hire companies for excess waiver. And we had to claim after a puncture, they paid up quickly without any problems. Our annual policy is about to expire (irritatingly whilst we will be in Europe with a hire car!) and we will be renewing it.

MrsE

Yeah - terrible really when you consider alot of people don't even look into their policies in that much detail and end up being ripped off!

We will probably go for the excess cover. Hope you have a good trip too! We are also going to Queensland (Goldcoast) and Sydney whilst over there but have rellies (now there's an aussie word!) who are going to lend us a car! When are you going and for how long etc?

MrsE

Great - thanks for that!

Wol

And many travel insurance policies cover excess payments for car hire as well - check yours.

bcworld

However there is a big gotcha with this & overseas rentals.

I recently hired a campervan in NZ. I declined the excess reduction option as my travel insurance already covered me for the amount of the excess. The excess reduction would've cost me total NZD70.

Because I didn't take an excess reduction option the hire company charged a bond to my credit card of NZD1900 - the fact that you have other insurance arranged makes no difference to them, they will insist on taking their bond - which is fair enough. It was actually charged as they said a pre-authorisation isn't suitable for more than a few days.

So I was hit by a currency conversion fee on being charged, a currency conversion fee on being refunded and with an exchange rate change over the period....grand total lost A$120!

Clearly if I had thought about this more closely I would've just paid them the NZD70!

Wol

Ooh!

paulry

Best to get the excess covered. It's a price worth paying if you are in an unfamiliar country.

paulry

I've just got stung for the balance of our motorhome hire - it went through @ todays rates <ouch>

bcworld

OP...try holidayautos.co.uk - they tend to offer low excess deals and reasonable rates to reduce the excess. Had a quick look and a 7 day rental cost £33 for what they referred to as 'Total Damage Excess Waiver' - whatever that might be...check the T&Cs.

jayr

as someone else said there are travel insurance policies that specifically cover vehicle hire excesses.

However, if you had an accident of some sort you would still have to pay the hire company say $3000 up-front and reclaim later through travel insurance so don't rely on that if it would cause cashflow problems.

I used to have annual multi-trip insurance for about $400/annum. I hired a van to move house; got stung by the hire company for a pre-exisitng scratch and had to pay up but later reclaimed off my travel insurance.

I should note that the hire company "ABEL" later had the Queensland Office Of Fair Trading ban the owner from running the company following a string of similar complaints.