Rental Vehicle Insurance Excess

[serfty]

What can be frightening is when the company preauthorises the full excess amount at the time of the rental. :shock: Can destroy your available credit limit on a credit card. For this reason I prefer charge cards for travel.

My credit limit on Amex is pretty tight but I find Budget rent a car quite good when it comes to pre-authorisation. On Monday they only pre-authorised the expected rental charge of $131.16. On other occassions they have pre-authorised around $200 above the expected rental charge.

Sounds pretty fair to me.

It doesn't happen often. However, I recently booked a car for SEA and the LOTFAP and the T&C specifically indicated the pre-authorisation would include any applicable exess.

I had the feeling this is used more af "a stick" (rather than a carrot) to value add by encouraging the customer taking out insurance.