Great travel bargains!

jules- i'm confused about something.

it's my understanding that when you rent a car it automatically comes with some insurance.  not sure they could let you drive off the lot w/o.

but you can pay for extra insurance- lower deductable, covers accidential damage, covers personal possessions in the car, etc.

am i wrong?

jules- i'm confused about something.

it's my understanding that when you rent a car it automatically comes with some insurance.  not sure they could let you drive off the lot w/o.

but you can pay for extra insurance- lower deductable, covers accidential damage, covers personal possessions in the car, etc.

am i wrong?

If I still had a car in the US with insurance, that insurance would cover me in a rental car(rental agencies always try to sell it to you but you don't need it if you already have personal car insurance).

When you are booking a car in the US it doesn't come with the extra insurance because most people already have it. When you book a car from outside the US the rental price includes insurance since foreign travelers will need it. At least that is my understanding.

really? 

i've actually found the opposite.  when i book on hertz.co.uk website, the price is much cheaper (often) than hertz.com. 

i'm not sure they could enforce this.  when i lived in the US (obviously on a US licence), i didn't always have a car (hence didn't always have car insurance).  i sometimes rented cars and didn't purchase extra insurance then.

car rental insurance is one of those things that is very confusing.  we've had several posts over the months/years, and i still don't understand it.  hm.

Pebbles, do you remember how much the insurance was per day?

I ask because since we don't have any car insurance in the states we will need to buy it for the rental. I just checked out Hotwire's rates and they are very good but don't give you insurance, it says to buy it at the counter. I wonder how much extra the insurance will add to the bill? Any idea?

I have the same problem and we had a whole thread going about that. We discovered the best bet was to book Alamo from the UK, and if you do that they include all the extra insurance (which would otherwise have cost a few hundred dollars more). We looked at some holidaymakers Web site and the prices looked good, but upon investigation you had to have a UK driver's license. Now of course the person renting you the car in the States might not check or care about that if you have a U.S. license, but the problem we were afraid of was if we had an accident, the car rental place could use lack of the Brit license that was stipulated in the contract as reason to not pay up.