When you’re hiring a car, like many renters you may find that the rental price includes some elements of insurance (although this may not be the case in the USA, Canada and a few other countries around the world). That may sound like a great thing and it may be, but typically it is unlikely to be all-inclusive in the sense that it will protect you from all costs following an accident.

The problem is that insurance supplied by a car rental company may bring with it the much-dreaded ‘excess’.

The excess is an amount of money, typically between £500-£1500, that the car rental company’s insurance will insist you pay as the first-part of any claim. It a sense, it can be seen as a mandatory contribution.

In other words, with an excess of £1000 and a claim for damage to the hire car of £800, you’re likely to see an £800 charge to your credit card. If the damage repairs had cost £1100, you would have been charged £1000 and the rental company’s insurance would have contributed the extra £100.

This is not always a risk people are prepared to accept and it is possible to do something about it.

The rental companies will typically be eager to charge you extra for insurance that will ‘top-up’ your cover by reducing or removing that excess.

You can also achieve the same thing and typically more cheaply, by purchasing what’s called ‘excess insurance’ from the specialist Internet-based providers of car insurance. If the rental company does bill you for ‘excess’, you can simply claim this back.

The specialist providers also have another trick up their sleeve in that they can sell such policies on an annual basis rather than just for the duration of a given car rental. The annual hire car insurance policy would then offer you protection against excess charges for any vehicle rented in the lifetime of the policy.

This annual hire car insurance may offer regular renters very attractive options for saving both time and money – in fact it may even be beneficial if you plan to rent just once in the period.

The annual hire car insurance sold by the specialist providers may not cover certain types of specialist vehicle hire such as sports cars or motor homes. Full details are typically available on their web sites.