It was meant to be a dream holiday to WA’s picturesque Kimberley coast. But when thieves stole and burnt Ron Thorburn’s hire car, the family trip turned into a costly nightmare…..read more>
Category Archives: Allianz
Fee Fighters: How to beat crazy rental car hire insurance fees
Insurance on a rental car can now be more expensive than hiring the vehicle itself.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Analysis by News Corp Australia shows that adding insurance to the cost of renting a Hyundai Elantra for a week doubles the price.
For example, through Hertz, intermediate vehicles are available for $316 per week, whereas its “SuperCover” product is $322. more……
New Zealand Tripcover Launches Car Rental Excess Insurance New Rates and Policies
Car rental rip-offs have been very topical lately, especially when the rental companies are falsely charging its customers for damage that they were not responsible for.
One way to counter this type of fraud is to let third party car rental excess insurance companies fight the battle with the rental companies. Tripcover is one such insurance company that offer such policies in Australia and now a full policy offering in New Zealand for residents and overseas visitors.
For six years now Tripcover has been offering Australians and overseas visitors to Australia a chance to offset this car rental excess liability and they sell over a million dollars worth of cover for Allianz Gloabl Assistance now. They now have the same policy offering in New Zealand for New Zealanders and overseas visitors to New Zealand.
For more on what they offer visit Tripcover.com.au and Tripcover.co.nz
How This Startup Created a Funding Channel
I know this is going to sound very simple but I am about to tell you what has been a very valuable and lucky result of setting up a Paypal payment gateway.
First a bit about our business. Tripcover sells car rental excess insurance in Australia, and for Aussies going overseas, direct to the car rental customer and competes head on with the car rental companies and they don’t like us…ha!
We, my brother Steve Sherlock and myself Desmond Sherlock started the business at the start of 2012, creating Australia’s first standalone car rental excess insurance business and thus a new category was born here.
After the first 3 years I decided to add a paypal payment gateway and offer it as a zero payment fee option. It was an instant hit with our customers with about a 30% uptake.
Then about 18 moths ago Paypal started its Working Capital offering to customers with a track record of sales. This is a great service where we can decide how much % from each sale goes to make repayments and also choose how long we wish to take out the loan for and thus the size of the fee we wish to pay.
This has allowed us to take out a few small loans now and use them along with some local state grants/loans from Iowa and and the Global Insurance Accelerator (GIA)to expand our business into the USA over the past 2 years, creating:
www.pablow.com – Pablow Pronto, vacation rental managers earn extra revenue while offering cancellation protection to guests and owners, in under 2 minutes!
www.bonzah.com – Bonzah provides affordable and primary rental car damage insurance compared to the rental desk. So, travel anywhere with your rental car and take pleasure in declining the expensive rental car company insurance offer
www.pteet.com – Rental Car Damage Protector provides up to $40,000 in primary coverage and annual policy with coverage up to $45,000.
So I highly recommend this funding option when only small seed is needed while we are working on getting traction.
Rental sCARe Mongering
Car Rental Companies Scare Mongering Tactics
The other day I received a strange comment on our Facebook ad, so I checked their profile and found out that they worked for Thrifty but failed to disclose.
Here is their comment/queston:
“Just so long as they realise they have to have up to $4500 available to pay the excess in the first instance. It’s only an excess refund policy.”
Not true. I went to my local Thrify depot and was told how it works.
It is optional if you take their CDW (Collision Damage Weaver) as it is to take the cover
that we sell for Allainz. If the customer does not take their CDW then that is fine and the car rental company will take a small amount out of your credit card as a deposit. The same applies if the customer has their own cover or uses Tripcover car rental excess insurance.
If you don’t have the funds to pay for major damage then that is the rental company’s problem not yours. If you have a debt card they will take some $750 out as surety. But once again if the damage costs exceed what you have in your bank then that is their problem not yours (liability is around $4000)
We ensure that we warn our customers on our home page of what our product is ie
a typical, insurance reimbursement, policy and you would need to claim from Allianz.
But it is true that if you have an accident the car rental company will assess how much damage costs and will err on the side of caution and usually charge your card around $4000 and refund later when they have an accurate quote. If it was just tyre or windscreen damage they would just charge the estimated costs.
It would be up to our customer to then submit a claim with Allianz and once completed
would be refunded within 10 working days.
The car rental companies are not happy that we sell this insurance cover as they make a large degree of their profits from their CDW and have been doing so in Australia for the last 50 or so years.
Tripcover was the first standalone reseller of this type of car rental excess insurance policy in Australia, starting in Jan 2012. We now sell over $1.5M worth of cover each year and it is growing annually with a number of new players in the market also.
Thrifty, Avis and all the other major car rental companies have failed to react to our foray into this market, other than try scare mongering, but like all lazy and greedy incumbents they may rue the day that they failed to heed the complaints of their customers and our warnings.
Top reasons your free credit card travel insurance could be denied
Common knock-back 1: “Oh, you actually think you can claim on that?”
I’m starting with the “automatic” insurance often offered domestically that reimburses nose-bleed car hire excesses (and saves you buying the rental company’s extortionate insurance) … if it’s worth the paper it’s fine-printed on. more…..
Very cheap, very easy and quick to get a quote and apply. Excellent
Very cheap, very easy and quick to get a quote and apply. Also, it covers tyre and windscreen, and you can pay by PayPal, so no charge for credit card! Highly recommended. Excellent!!!!!
View here…..>
Ultimate Guide To Rental Car Insurance (Guest Post)
Guest Blog Post
You’ve heard this one. It’s the birthday of someone special. In your opportune hours of kindness and generosity, you planned to put them behind the wheel of a nice car and travel somewhere special, maybe even somewhere magical. You didn’t purchase rental car insurance.
Things didn’t go as planned.
It might have been an accidental dent on your door from a nearby car, or perhaps you were simply blamed for damage that you missed during the inspection when you were at peak excitement for the adventure ahead. Was it really your fault? You hand the keys back with a whopping $5000 hit to your credit card and a sour taste in your mouth as you utter… more>
Latest Car Rental Excess Insurance Claim Review
The latest claims review for our car rental excess insurance product from another satisfied customer
by far the best insurance company I dealt with
A Question from one of Our Customers
Jerzy:
“I recently purchased Tripcover for a rental car hire.
After picking up the car, I realised that the car had existing damage that I had not reported on the Damage Form that I signed.
I am concerned that I may have to pay the excess to Budget and put in a claim if they try to say the damage occurred during my rental period.
I have been looking over your claim form in case I need to complete it.
Can you please tell me what you mean by Police or Accident report and what you would require for this type of damage so that I can be prepared if Budget charge me the excess for this damage.”
Tripcover Team Member:
The police report is only needed if it was a significant accident Kate.
This is a common trick the car rental companies can play with their customers.
Always pays to walk around the car and video it or take a few pics.