Car rental expenses may accumulate, but can easily be avoided.
When we talk about car hire, we often talk about additional insurance. The only insurance you need, however, is the deductible insurance, and this can cost several hundred kroner per rental day if you buy it directly from the rental company.
‘’The solution is to obtain a credit card that has this insurance included’’ said Anders Fagereng, general manager of the consumer portal Dinero.no.
Every year, the website runs through all available credit cards in Norway to investigate which offer insurance to their users. In 2019, over 30 different cards offered insurance.
‘’Some offer the insurance free of charge as long as one pays for the rental car with the card, some require insurance premium of a few hundred kroner a year. The sum total is, however, that the insurance is cheaper through the credit card than via the rental company, which requires between 1500 and1900 NOK a week’’ said Fagereng.
The Consumer Portal Dinero.no have prepared an overview of which credit cards offer this insurance, updated for 2019. The table shows what the insurance might cost, how long it applies etc.
“We recommend everyone to investigate the conditions to make sure they are covered when renting a car and paying with their credit card” emphasised Fagereng.
The article continues below the table most of the car rental agreements include body and liability insurance. However, the deductible of this insurance covers a rental car insurance.
The deductible for damage to the car can vary based on the type of car model and can go up to NOK 10,000 and NOK 20,000 per claim.
At the same time, the various insurance policies have different limits depending on how much the rental car is worth. If you, for example, damage a car with a value of NOK 600,000 with insurance from Storebrand MasterCard Platinum, the insurance will not cover the damage. However, if you have a card from KLP, rental cars with a value of up to NOK 1 million are covered. The insurance period will also vary.
‘’There is a bit of insurance duration variation. The usual insurance period is around 31 days.
At the same time, some cards have as low a coverage as 14 days, and some 90 days.
The different cards are widely different and have varied advantages and disadvantages.
Some cards require high annual fees, and some have better benefit programs than others.
‘’These are factors that should be taken into account if you want to get a new credit card to get the insurance before you leave. Check out which card suits your needs, what the possible price of the card is and what will pay off for you in general’’ said Fagereng.
It is worth noting that you should pay back what you spend on the credit card before the interest rate runs up, so you avoid spending more money than necessary on this he concluded.
Source: dinero.no / Norway Today
