When you have been standing at the desk of the hire company you might have been faced by a common dilemma – the agreement you are about to sign might include car rental insurance, but the amount of excess this leave you potentially responsible for paying seems very high. Do you want to add the daily cost of excess insurance to your car hire bill, or are you prepared to take the risk and let the unprotected excess stand? It might prove quite a dilemma.

Although there is probably very little you may do about it by the time you are standing at the rental company desk, you might have saved yourself such mental agony by arranging car hire excess insurance in advance.

A dilemma resolved

The way you might have resolved the dilemma is through the simple expedient of arranging excess cover for your car rental insurance in advance. Typically, using an online facility set up by specialist providers of such hire car cover, it takes just a few minutes to select the package that is most appropriate to your needs.

Thus, you may typically choose from a range of differently priced option cover for just a few days of car hire or periods of up to 60 days. Similarly, you may choose whether the excess cover you need is likely to be restricted to hire car driving just within Europe or more or less anywhere in the world.

What is more, this kind of standalone excess insurance from an independent insurance provider typically offers protection that is valid for the whole year. In other words, the insurance remains in place however many times you travel abroad and rent a car, although restrictions may apply to the maximum rental period during any one trip.

There may be other advantages to arranging your car rental insurance excess cover in this way. For example:

• not only might you enjoy full protection against the cost of any applicable excess, but also cover for such parts of the rental vehicle as the roof, windows, tyres and underside (areas typically excluded in many car rental insurance agreements); and

• the automatic inclusion within the excess insurance package of up to seven additional drivers (usually required to be more than 21 years of age.

The next time you anticipate trying to decide whether to pay the car rental company’s daily excess insurance premium or to take a chance on no accidents happening, therefore, you might wish to give a little advance thought to separate car rental insurance excess cover from a specialist provider.