Rental Car Contracts BEWARE

If you have been involved in a car accident, and it was not your fault, you in most instances you are entitled to get a rental car. In an accident case you may keep the rental until the repairs are completed to your car. If your car is a total loss, you should be able to keep the rental until you receive the total loss check. In accident cases, and while on vacation, you may wonder whether you should obtain the rental insurance the company offers. The answer in most cases should be no.

If you have collision, and liability insurance, your own insurance should cover you while in a rental car. Check with your agent, if unsure, but this should be the case. Further, certain credit cards also provide insurance if you charge the rental car bill using their card. Therefore, if you purchase rental car insurance, you may be buying something you already have paid for.

If you elect to decline the insurance read the contract carefully! Dollar Rental car agents, for example, when customers decline the insurance, ask them to initial certain boxes. Unlike other car company contracts, the Dollar contract is unclear and maybe purposely confusing. Be careful. When checking, decline, you may infact be buying the insurance. Specifically, a Dollar contract asks you, if you decline, to initial under the words: accept or decline with the daily rate listed. By initialing, unless you specifically write out the word, DECLINED, you may be held responsible because of the way they wrote their contract. In contrast, Enterprise, spells out the word decline on its contract and all you have to do is initial right next to that word. Our advice, be careful, and stay away from companies like Dollar with ambiguous contracts. In an effort to help consumers, our office will be seeking a review of Dollar contracts with the State Attorney General's office. We asked the Dollar company to review and correct its contract after this came to our attention. Dollar has refused, we can only assume its worth too much money to keep an ambiguous contract.