Visa Credit Card: Collision Damage Waiver

Last week wasn't a great week. Why? Well...

• Heavy rain fall on the weekend, so no photography.
  
• Sickness (cold and cough). A big thank to my co-workers.
• Lakers without Bynum continues to lose.
  
• Car break down. Gak, Gak, Gak.
• Pushing a dead car to the auto shop in the rain.
• Car break down again one day later. Same sound. Gak, Gak, Gak.
• Getting the car repaired in the morning, and worked from noon to night.
• After the second fixes, my car making the same sound on Friday mourning.
  

Now, to add to the string of bad lucks, I had an important presentation on the late morning of the same Friday! I decided to not gamble with my car, and went to Enterprise Rent-A-Car. The store did not have an economy car available($25 per day), so I got a standard car($35 per day). In my opinion, renting a car for $35/day wasn't a bad deal, until I looked at the insurances. There were three insurance coverages that totaled to $24. To be honest, I did know that my Visa card has some rental car insurance, but I was not sure of the detail. Being short on time, and ignorance of my own insurance coverage on rental car, I agreed to all the coverages just to be on the safe side.

After I returned the rental car, I got curious and decided to investigate Visa's insurance coverage on rental car. Few hours of researching, I found something really neat about Visa's coverage. Now, the following applied to Visa credit card only, because Master Card and AmEx have different policies.

Most Visa card has Collision Damage Waiver(CDW), sometimes called Loss Damage Waiver(LDW), that does a full coverage on your rental car. However, note that there are differences between renting a car outside your country, and within your own country.

If you rent a car within your own country, Visa's CDW is a secondary coverage, which means Visa will pay an additional coverage to the primary coverage(your auto insurance). For example, if the damage is worth $5,000, and the primary insurance covers only $3,000, then Visa will pay the additional $2,000. Of course, this assumed that the car worth more than $5,000 to begin with. Now, there are few restrictions before this Visa's coverage kicks in.

• Must use Visa card to pay for the car rental.
• Does not cover if renting more than 15 consecutive days.
• Must declined auto rental company's CDW or LDW option.
• Does not cover expensive car like Bentley, Ferrari, Porsche, Lotus, etc.
• A reasonable care of the car. No alcohol or drug. No intention of hitting. Blah, blah, blah.

Now, should you ever get into an accident with rented car, there are few things you must do within the time limit...

• Contact Visa Benefit Administrator within 45 days of the collision or loss.
• Complete and send the Visa Auto Rental CDW Claim Form within 90 days of the damage, even if other required documents are not available yet.

For the official and complete detail on Visa's CDW coverage, including how Visa's CDW works on foreign country, click here. So, at the end of the day, if I had been paying more attention to my auto insurance policy, and Visa's CDW coverage, I could have saved myself up to $24. Was it a lot of money? Not really. I would have saved $10 on CDW. The presentation was more important to me on that day. Nonetheless, an important lesson to myself here is to read the fine print of these policies and benefits on my free time. This time it is only $24, but next time, it could be hundreds or thousands.

Link:

• Visa Card Benefit - Auto Rental Collision Damage Waiver - Personal
• USA Today article on rental car insurance (Dec. 10, 2007)