How to save you money on your holiday car hire costs

When you are on holiday, you don’t want to be counting every penny you spend. But that is certainly no reason to be paying more than you need. After all, every little saved is likely to help you enjoy your holiday even more.

So, it might be helpful to see just how your expenditure on car hire insurance might actually lead to the kind of savings to give you money for spending on the things you might enjoy.

Plan in advance

For example, you may have followed the advice given by Martin Lewis on the Money Saving Expert website and made a point of booking your hire car well in advance of your travel. According to his survey of the market, savings might be quite significant if you remember to book ahead.

Such advance thinking, however, may all prove to no avail, if one of the hidden catches to the rental deal you have struck comes with a high excess on the car hire insurance. Depending where in the world you are going to be driving and the vehicle you want to rent, the excess might set you back well over a thousand pounds if you are unfortunate enough to have an accident.

Excess insurance

When making your reservation, therefore, you might also take the precaution of signing up for any excess insurance cover on offer from the car rental company.

Certainly, this might save you from becoming seriously out of pocket in the event of the untoward event, but you might recoil to learn just how much the rental company is likely to charge for such protection.

The alternative

The alternative is to arrange your excess insurance through a specialist provider. Not only may you buy such cover well in advance of your trip, you might even want to take advantage of the annual deals typically offered by such providers – with the payment of one single premium, you may be covered for the next 12 months, confident in the knowledge that however many times you are likely to be hiring a car, the excess is safely protected.

It is also possible to tailor your excess cover to suit the particular part of the world in which you intend to be driving – excess cover may prove cheaper for rentals in the UK and Europe for example than rentals in the rest of the world, which tends to be cheaper again than the United States.

A further advantage in buying your excess cover from an independent provider such as this is that the protection is likely to be even more comprehensive than that offered by the car rental company. Cover provided by the latter, for instance, commonly excludes damage to areas of the vehicle such as tyres, windows, the roof and underside. Independently arranged excess insurance on the other hand may have no such exclusions but simply reimburse you whatever the excess you are charged, to whatever part of the vehicle may have been damaged.