Originally Posted by
MDtR-Chicago
So if you pay for a CC or rental company's primary coverage, you are effectively paying twice for the same risk mitigation.
How? I see my options as these:
(1) Sign up for the Amex coverage (again, confirming that the target rental isn't in an "off-limits" country for their service).
(2) Call my regular auto insurance company and ask them to write a short-term policy for me covering the specific dates and countries in question, at a cost.
(3) Buy whatever Hertz wants to sell me when I pick up the car.
(4) Let it ride: buy nothing and assume that if I trash the car that the secondary Amex or Visa Signature coverage will take good care of me even though I have no other valid insurance at all.
So in the absence of somebody personally assuring me that (4) is a leadpipe lock in the target country, I don't see how I'm overbuying insurance. I would never do more than one of the first three options.
For what it's worth, I've called about option (2) before. It was more expensive than $25 but well less than what the rental agency would have charged. This was 6-7 years ago and I was getting a two-week quote. The benefit was that my insurance company would produce a PDF with my policy details written in the languages of every country I was planning to drive through along with instructions for how to initiate a claim. So instead of trying to explain to a cop, in Arabic or French or German or whatever, that my credit card provided insurance, I would have a more traditional "proof of insurance" to show.
Philosophically, you're not actually paying for auto insurance in either case, tho. In the first, you are insuring against wasting your time. It's hassle insurance. In the second, you are insuring against your regular auto policy premium going up, since you are more likely than usual to have an accident.
Either way, I do have to buy the auto insurance once from somebody.