Hi folks, yes that’s right I am writing an article about our number one competitor as it enters our category and market place. Allianz.com.au, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies has now entered the car rental excess insurance market and is competing head to head with Tripcover’s car rental excess insurance products.

This is a great sign for us as a giant like Allianz, entering this category that my brother Steve and I created in Australia, verifies that this means business and our category is not likely to go away anytime soon.

And what is this category? Well, anyone that has ever rented a car will know what I am talking about. You know, you get to the car rental desk and they ask you if you want to take out their CDW or Collision Damage Waiver (it is basically their own insurance that
they manage themselves only they can’t call it insurance).

Now this CDW can cost as much as the rental car itself or even more, per day and so can double your rental costs.  The car rental insurance policy that Tripcover sells is around $9 per day. Although the policy that Allianz sells is the exact same product, supplied by Allianz Global Assistance, they have a higher rate due to it covering 21 to 75 year olds. We have split our age range so that you can by our policy for either 25 to 75 year olds or 21 to 24 year olds and it is considerably cheaper.

About the Car Rental Excess Insurance Category
With present sales of around $10M in Australia and representing around 3% of the car rental insurance market, we estimate that the category will be worth some $38M by 2020 and represent around 8 to 10% of the car rental insurance market place, by then.
Car rental excess insurance has been going in Australia since the start of 2012, for over 4 years now and we see it becoming main stream by 2020.