A big part of our roving retirement nomadic lifestyle involves lots and lots of car rentals. As you can imagine, with that many car rentals, there are bound to be incidents. For small incidents like scraping a wheel, we typically pay for any nominal charges ourselves. (It only happened once, in the UK, whilst driving on the wrong side of the road, around road furniture.) But we always make sure that we have insurance for any larger car-related incidents.
Insure Thyself
Even though we don’t own a car, Diana and I still have our own car insurance to cover us when driving in the US. However, contrary to common belief, your personal car insurance isn’t usually a great way to get coverage for rental cars. Here is some of their fine print:
“Although physical damage coverage — for example, comprehensive and collision — on your policy extends to non-owned vehicles, in most locations, there is no coverage for fees the rental company may charge for 1) Loss of use of the vehicle, if damaged. 2) Decrease in the value of the vehicle due to any damage sustained. 3) Administrative costs.”
One option is to get insurance from the rental car agency. Sadly, the insurance add-on charges can be very high relative to the cost of the rental. Another option is to use a third party like Allianz, which can often be had for $11/day. Not bad, but we have a better choice available.
Our Chase Sapphire Reserve (CSR) credit card covers all of those things when I use the card to rent a car. Another caveat is that the rental is less than 31 days. I mention the duration limitation because I often need to rent longer. So I either have to get other insurance or return the car within a month and start a new rental. CSR insurance is primary, meaning I don’t have to involve my own car insurance company if something happens.
I Backed into a Wall
My rental car transport of choice for a part of winter last year was a GMC Yukon (aka The Beast). It is quite a large vehicle, bigger than I’m used to, but I needed the space for all of my family and our ski gear to get to Tahoe. After that trip, I kept The Beast to drive to Park City, Utah for more skiing with Diana. (For great rates on rental cars, check out our article on Autoslash.)
Our Park City timeshare has underground parking and it can get quite full. Unfortunately, while trying to hurriedly turn The Beast around to snag a spot, I backed into a wall and damaged my right rear turn lights and fender. The imminent impact warning beeps were too slow to prevent the damage :-(.
I Filed a Claim
Knowing I would have to face the music on this when I turned in The Beast, I collected and reviewed the CSR rental car claim info. Upon returning the SUV, the agent took down my CSR insurance info and I filled in some boxes in their form describing the accident. I then took the info from the rental car agency and filed a claim online with the CSR insurance benefits manager, www.eclaimsline.com.
One critical option I chose was for Eclaims to pay the rental car agency directly for damages. I believe this is important because the insurance provider can negotiate what reasonable charges there would be for damage and loss of use. Being in the middle of that discussion didn’t sound like fun to me.
I Was Redeemed
Because I instructed payment to go directly from the insurance provider to the rental car company, everything related to processing the claim happened without my involvement. A few months after filing the claim, I got a letter saying the claim was settled for $1000. I owed nothing.
Although getting into an accident is never good, it is hard for me to imagine a less painful or costly way to deal with one. I am completely sold on car rental using a CSR card (or some other credit card with similar benefits) in the future. Driving a Beast, however, has become less appealing.
How do you insure rental cars?
4 comments
I don’t rent cars as often as you but take the same protection by paying with a Chase Visa card. I totaled a car and since it was my first (and only) attempt to use credit card rental car insurance, I braced for having to shell out thousands of dollars. Long story short, there were a few phone calls but about a month later the card insurance paid in full. Whew!
The accident itself was harrowing. We were driving on a Wyoming freeway through a rainstorm. It was heavy rain, but I’ve driven in much worse. We hit a puddle that caused the car to hydroplane and did a 540 degree spin, coming to rest backwards against the guardrail. Actual damage to the car’s body was not too bad, a guardrail scrape against a door and quarter panel. But the tranny was toast. I distinctly remember a “Grrrr didididid click click click” sound coming from below as the car went down the road at 50 MPH backwards while still in gear. I guess a few cogs in the drivetrain were shredded.
Having never hydroplaned even in Gulf Coast storms three times as severe, I was curious about the cause. Turns out all four tires were nearly bald with about 1-2mm of tread left. But how could that happen to a rental car with just 3000 miles on the odometer? Best guess is that a prior customer swapped the tires out with some worn out tires, acquiring a set of new tires for the cost of one day’s rental. I was kind of pissed at the rental agency for handing me the keys to an unsafe vehicle. Especially when a few years later I found that they had blacklisted me from renting from them again.
The lesson I learned is to budget a few minutes to do a safety check, including checking the tire condition, before driving off of the rental car lot.
Dang, another thing to be wary of when checking over a rental car. If they only notice it when I return the car, they might charge me! Thanks for the heads up.
Damn road furniture! Which is the worse drive, The Beast or The Great Pumpkin?
The Pumpkin was worse, by far! That last time out: the brakes nearly failed coming down a mountain road, a window got stuck down and the carpet starred smoking because it was burning from the exhaust pipe below it. It did score points for character.