Is your included coverage enough, or should you take out a separate policy?
It is common for credit card companies to provide rental car insurance when they are advised in advance that the vehicle will be rented, and when that account is used to pay for renting it, but many people wonder if the coverage that is provided is enough, or if they would be better off purchasing an additional policy.
Many people simply purchase an additional policy because they find their credit card coverage confusing.
Data from the industry group called the Insurance Information Institute has shown that the majority of rental car policies from a credit card cover a policyholder who is driving the vehicle. However, the details of the policies vary significantly from one credit card issuer to the next. There are also many different forms of exclusions.
For instance, many credit card rental car insurance policies will not cover vehicles rented for business.
For this reason, it is very important to check with an agent or with a credit card company to see exactly what kind of rental car insurance you have and whether or not you feel that it is enough coverage.
Moreover, there is a significant amount of variation in the level of coverage that each card issuer provides. Though all of the major card networks – Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover – do offer protection on some level, each has its own limits and regulations.
For example, MasterCard is the only one among the four networks that does not offer rental car insurance for all of its cardholders. For that reason, it is very important to check with your credit card company in order to see if you have any coverage at all.
A comparison of the rental car insurance policies offered by the various networks was performed by CardHub. There was a maximum score of 55 points available, with a maximum of 35 points allotted to coverage quality, and both the ease of use of the coverage and the filing of a claim were each worth a maximum possible 10 points.
Among them, Visa scored the highest, partly due to its towing coverage and the fact that its rental car insurance pays the vehicle company for the loss of use of the vehicle that was damaged. The rest of the companies followed in points in the order of: Discover, American Express, and then MasterCard.