Be careful with Europe car insurance - by Ed Perkins
If you plan to rent a car in Europe, you have to be more careful than ever about avoiding exorbitant insurance costs. That means renting with a credit card that provides no-cost collision coverage. And--on some rentals--it means paying with AmEx or Visa, not MasterCard. Unless you've checked lately, you're in for sticker shock about insurance costs. Not only are collision-damage waiver (CDW) costs higher than they are in the U.S., but also you're apt to be hit with two different kinds of CDW. Regular CDW, which used to provide full coverage, now generally has a deductible of $500 to $2,500. To get full coverage, you have to add "super" coverage. And that adds up to a super expense: On a recent check for a compact rental in Frankfurt, for example, I found that the regular CDW was $34 a day and "super" added an additional $22, for a total of $56. Wow!
Another problem: On all of the rental programs I checked, CDW (as well as theft insurance) was mandatory in Italy. That's why rental rates are so much higher there than in most other European countries--somewhere around double.
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