Car hire excess insurance?

A snowHead

@LaForet, how many car rentals at GVA don't include CDW? I've just checked back on my rentals this season (six separate rentals, four with Hertz and two with Budget) and all of them include CDW, subject to an excess of 2000 CHFs which is covered by I4CH. Don't you have to go out of your way to get a car without CDW?

A snowHead

No, I just was using the regular Hertz website. All the extras were shown on a separate page after I selected the car. Stuff like child seats, extended recovery .... and CDW.

I did the same for a rental from Montpellier yesterday, adn the same happened. Selected the car, then was shown the options, one of which was CDW at £38/day extra.

I can well believe that there may be multiple versions of the website and that for some reason, some people are shown the pages where CDW is included in the base price. But clearly there is a version of the Hertz website that separates the two out and where you have to actively select it as an option. A friend of mine tried Avis yesterday and got the same thing with them.

So worth being aware of.

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@rob@rar, Sadly that's not true, at least for Sixt in Germany, the standard offer when I have used them in the past couple of years has been no CDW. Perhaps its different at Geneva but those hiring from Munich could potentially be tripped up by this. Personally think it is not a sensible way to go about business, I have always been happy with Sixt as have used them both for business & leisure for over 20 years with no complaints and now I just tick the basic CDW box but others might get caught out.

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I appreciate that some people may be sceptical that I'm getting this wrong, so here is the Hertz page from just a minute ago, booking a car at Montpellier in June. I chose the car, then this options page came up. Middle bottom is the CDW as 'Protect the car for added peace of mind' adding €220.50 to a five-day rental.

The 'More details'; says

'Collision Damage Waiver allows you to reduce your financial liability for loss or damage to Hertz rental vehicle, other than damage caused by theft, attempted theft or vandalism, to the amount of the applicable excess (as stated on your Rental Agreement, depending on the vehicle you rent with us). i.e. the amount of CDW liability is over-and-above the excess. Your excess cover pays for the excess only. Not the additional CDW liability.

And the statement from the insurance4carhire representative during my chat today was

If you are visiting Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, South America or the USA, then CDW insurance doesn't always come as standard. In the case that Collision Damage Waiver is not provided to you by the rental company, we can offer it to you under our Annual Worldwide Plus CDW & SLI policy. For anywhere else in the World, it normally comes included but in some cases you may have to pay extra.. THere was a lot more to-ing and fro-ing between us but the clear conclusion is that their CDW cover is not applicable in Europe.

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@LaForet, is that 220 Euro for CDW plus 105 Euro for Theft Protection, on top of 589 Euro for the basic car rental? Seems a lot for five days of car rental, although I've not rented from Montpellier before so maybe that's a typical price?

My rentals this season, from Hertz (booked direct) and Budget (booked via BA) have automatically included CDW and Theft Protection.

Edit: just noticed the 589 includes the optional CDW, but not Theft Protection.

After all it is free

@LaForet, which hertz website are you using? Out of interest, I just put in the same location, dates and pickup times on the hertz.co.uk website and that additional option does not come up for me. When I click through to the following page it‘s explicit that CDW is included.

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I'm not surprised that there's variation between the .com and .co.uk versions of the site. But does it make a difference? I mean, is the UK site cheaper for CDW included, or roughly the same? Is the site I've arrived at just splitting out the two, but the total is comparable? Or is the UK site actually a lot cheaper, and includes CDW as well?

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@LaForet, I can‘t tell without knowing what car you selected. But I couldn‘t match the price you displayed with any combination. I suspect using the .com domains is the source of the issue though, as it is probably assuming you are a US customer with CDW included in your own policy.

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The car is the cheapest - a Polestar EV on Hertz.com and a Fiat500 on hertz.co.uk - and when I go to the .co.uk site the cost comes out at £272 pre-pay or £412 paying at location, and includes CDW.

I can think of two reasons why I'm being dropped onto a different part of the site. One is, as mentioned, that I'm using hertz.com landing page and/or the other is because I was registering my Hertz Gold Club Membership.

Bonkers. But worth watching out for.

Thanks all for the feedback. At least I seem to have got to the bottom of the problem. But always worth checking you really have got CDW.

Interesting, I’ve never really thought about this before. I’ve always rented with some CDW so the excess has been up to £2k rather than the full value of the car.
Checking a rental I have booked in a few weeks they offer basic protection for no additional cost and included “Collision Damage & Theft Protection” with an extra excess of £2.7k, medium protection for £36/day with an excess of £800 of full protection for £48/day and no excess.
I’d hope th excess insurance would cover the £2.7k but it doesn’t seem that clear which is never good for insurance!

You know it makes sense.

Surely if your policy is “excess” cover it’s obvious that you have to have cdw in place because all that is covered is excesses?

Instead of booking direct use one of the consolidators and it’s included - our car at Lyon was only £200 for a week including CDW with a £2k excess so there is no way the cdw was anywhere near £36 a day and to cover up to £10k excess was £20 for the week.

But thank you for the heads up - one more thing to check when choosing who to book with.

Our “shock” was the cost of snow chains and that easyjet defaulted the main driver to be me - I didn’t intend to drive so our excess ins was in hubby’s name which meant it wasn’t valid. So while we were standing at Hertz desk we cancelled it, bought it again in my name then because i was getting really stressed and didn’t want to drive the agent added husband as an additional driver and waved the snow chain cost. Can’t fault Hertz at Lyon for the customer service - so different to Avis at Grenoble Laughing

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

When I took out ‘excess’ cover online the insurer’s site was really not clear about when CDW was included or not. Even using the online chat with a human rep, they wouldn’t/couldn’t answer the question about CDW cover explicitly with a simple yes or no. They define CDW only by reference to geography and inclusion i.e. they name countries where it applies (US, Canada, the Caribbean etc.) and talk about it not being included in the rental agreement. They never say where it is not applicable, just where it is. Except for one sentence in the fine print, stating that you are not covered if it’s offered and you decline it. That’s it.

So if like me, you somehow arrive at a place on the company rental site where the process doesn’t include it, you may not register that you don’t have CDW (obviously, I now check carefully every time). Especially if the whole dialogue looks exactly the same as when you rented previously, and it did. And you won’t appreciate either that you have, by the insurance4carhire definition, ‘declined’ the now optional CDW.

So you pick up the car and are driving around liable to the entire replacement cost of the vehicle should it be written off.

As for the comparison websites, I daresay they may include CDW, but can you be sure? The same problem could surely potentially occur? So I think it’s just worth being aware that something must have changed in their online systems, and it’s worth checking. And the reason why I was booking direct was that as a Hertz Gold Club member (it’s free to join) I got a 15% discount and a 2nd driver for free (I think Avis is similar), so a direct quote was overtly a better deal than a comparison site.

A snowHead

Sounds dubious though. CDW/LDW is available on US rental contracts. When I've booked through a consolidator it's always been there so I wonder if I4CH would try to weasel out anyway.

I think your lesson is to avoid booking directly with Hertz. Over a week or more their added CDW is getting on for what people might pay annually for car insurance - hell of a margin there.

A snowHead

Well, Hertz turned out fine as long as I landed on hertz.co.uk, not hertz.com, or hertz.ch. Hertz.co.uk was competitive for an automatic, and included CDW and I got a second driver for free as well. Not the very best rate for the cheapest model of manual, though. My companion was happy to go for a manual so in the end it was comparison site that won this time round.

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@LaForet, which comparison site did you use?

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Holiday Autos -> Europcar - I did the Hertz.co.uk/Hertz.com directly as a Gold a club member, and my fellow-traveller used his usual Holiday Autos. Last time we did this for Geneva, Hertz.ch came out on top, this time it was his comparison website that won it for a Montpellier rental.

As you might have inferred from my posts, the Hertz.com thing was a complete diversion, as it put forward CDW as an option when it had previously been included: sending me down the whole insurance4carhire.com rabbit-hole. hertz.co.uk was competitive for an auto but not a manual and Gold Club includes a free second driver, whereas it’s an add-on cost through HA’s Europcar. But by the end of the process I couldn’t be bothered to go through another iteration.

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Car hire excess insurance?

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