mss61

Will be traveling to England next month and need opinion on car insurance there...my credit card (Citibank Diamond Preferred Rewards) offers collision and thieft if I secure/pay with their card (which I will). My (State Farm) car insurance does not cover me out of the US. Does the CC thing work or is it a gimmick?? They also say liability coverage is included in the cost of the car rental. Should I just purchase the coverage from the rental (Hertz) car company.

andy

mss61--

Forget about your US credit card and it's insurance protection. ( We have AX and it also has protection--but you have to read the small print- it only covers AFTER you have paid the deductible-which in England can be quite high)...Everytime we rent a car outside of the US , we use AutoEurope and take ALL the insurance offered...including collision and theft...

If there is an accident and you have all the insurance, you basically can turn the car in and get another with no hassles....If you are using your own cc insurance, YOU will have to pay the deductible before they give you another car- and it can run super high....

Just remember you will be driving in England, on the wrong side of the road and you will have to remember to look left-- if you mess that up, an accident is going to happen...In Fact, in England, hubs kept hitting the left curbs , that by the time the car was returned to AutoEurope, I KNOW it needed to be re-aligned........

Final answer- Take the Hertz Insurance in total and save yourself a ton of grief...

Pegontheroad

We rented a car in the UK in September of 2001 and elected not to get CDW, because we were securing and paying with Visa Gold, which offered collision and theft. We were at fault in an accident that did a fair amount of damage to the rental car. The coverage worked like a charm and we didn't have to pay a cent. The car rental agency charged the Visa card for the repairs and sent us an itemized bill, which we then sent to Visa, which credited the entire cost back to the account.

Call the card company or carefully read their literature to make sure you'll have the coverage in your destination country.

Pegontheroad

The card we were using obviously had a different policy regarding the deductible than Andy's card, because we had no questions asked about the deductible. In fact, the accident caused amazingly little disruption in our travel plans. The driver of the other vehicle (a dump truck!) had a cell phone, from which we immediately called Avis to report the accident. Within an hour, Avis had a tow truck on site. He hooked up the car, we drove into the airport at Leeds, turned in our keys at the Avis desk, were given another car, and off we went for York, with barely a bump in our travel plans. We couldn't believe they would just give us another car, with no questions asked. The fools!

Have a great time driving in England!. The combination of driving on the left hand side of the road, along with very narrow country roads in the cotswolds, is challenging but a great deal of fun!

Bob_C

Andy, you do not drive on the wrong side of the road in England. You drive on the left side, there is no right or wrong.

Mary_Fran

Are people in the UK really upset when travelers from the US, Canada, France, Germany, etc., speak of driving on the "wrong side" of the road? Surely they understand that we mean a side of the road that would be the wrong side in the countries we're from and hence difficult for us to adapt to in the two or three weeks we're traveling in their country?

AR

Hi Mary Fran. No, we Brits don't get upset because it's you driving on the wrong side of the road. LOL

isabel

Just returned two days ago from England and Ireland where we rented cars (used Visa in England, Europecar and MasterCard in Ireland, Hertz). Both times we declined the CDW with no problems. We had no accidents or even scratches. I have done extensive research with the rental car and credit card companies since there is so much false information out there (including on this board). Both Visa and MasterCard cover you with NO deductible (Andy is just wrong about that - and it's not the bank that you get the card through, it's VISA and MasterCard who do the insurance). The only problem can be that the rental car company will charge whatever the damage is to your card and then once the paper work is submitted the card company reimburses you. So if you totaled the car and didn't have a high enough credit limit you card would be frozen. You get around that by having more than one credit card.