In 2002 there was only one player in the car hire excess insurance market, today in 2010 there are at least 31 and numbers still increasing. Does this mean that the customer is benefiting or just becoming more confused?

In 2002 Larry Ursich founded insurance4carhire.com. He had previously run his own car rental broking company for 10 year. He was concerned about the high costs being charged by the car hire companies for Excess cover and decided to develop a better alternative: annual car rental Excess insurance products offering customers convenience, peace of mind and very significant savings.

So that was the beginning of the business and over the next few years the product was developed and the company included new brands like the dailyexcess.com and in January 2008 the insurance4carhire.com operation was sold to Towergate .

About the same time Questor insurance and Carhire-excess.com, also started offering car hire insurance.

Today the market looks flooded, admittedly some of the organizations offering car hire excess insurance use one of the established brands. For example The AA, insuremycar.com, Rental car hire insurance, Swinton, Go cover, ECB, carentalexcessinsurance, carhireinsure use insurance4carhire and confused.com and Intasure use Questor. This still leaves some fourteen others selling this product.

Earlier this year Halo Insurance Services launched iCarhireinsurance.com and Odyssey insurance launched their excess products. Most of these companies are based in Britain, The Isle of Man and Ireland.

Prices are becoming keener with European daily excess products starting at £1.94 / €2.95 per day and European annual products starting at £39.75 / €49.00. In the last few months to help a comsumer price comparison site has been established, although it is not really too difficult for the average person to look at the main providers and see what that company is offering for it's daily or annual policy.

insurance4carrental.com a car hire insurance advertising site is now promoting six providers. Insurance4carhire, daily excess.com, Questor, Essential Travel, Odyssey and icarhireinsurance. Details about each provider's products are easy to locate and compare as each product is located on an individual page.

One area where there is not too much competition is with van hire insurance. Just as important as car hire excess insurance. A division of Towergate's insurance4carhire.com has set up insuremyvan.com. This product is being advertised on the www.insurance4vanrental.com site. Unlike the car hire products which are available on a worldwide market, this is only available in the UK at present.

None of the excess insurance companies appear to be addressing a growing sector of the market. Motorhome hire. There are more and more people renting these vehicles and in fact one of the world's largest car brokers, holiday autos has recently added this together with UK van hire to their range of vehicle rental products.

Hopefully an insurance company will introduce a product in due course to deal with the campervan market.

What happens next in the car hire insurance business, will there be more entrants or are there too many already? Has it got too confusing?

(May 2010 ©jmlpropertyservices - Philip Suter)

N.B. This information should not be relied on for accuracy and is presented here without the responsibility of jml Property Service and the website it is being displayed at. jml property Services 05-10

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