car rental insurance

"is there anyway that your own car insurance would cover this?"

No one here can know the answer to that, but you can find out by talking with your insurance agent, other insurance consultant who has knowledge of your auto policy, or reading it yourself.

As a general statement only, most travelers here find that their US auto insurance does not cover them in rental cars in Europe.

There's a few options with the insurance.

If your credit card offers it, you can use their coverage. However, a lot of people have posted on here about their claims being denied by the credit card companies. And most don't offer liability.

You can do it all through the rental company, CDW and daily excess, called super CDW. It's pricey, but it takes care of everything. If anything happens, all you have to say when you return the car is "oops."

You can get the CDW through the rental company and the daily excess (covers the deductible, usually between 1100-1500 euro) through a 3rd party company. I did this and am in the process of filing a claim. I'm not sure at this point if it's worth the $100 bucks I saved. For one thing, I forgot about the 3% foreign transaction fee with my credit card, and that alone was almost $50.

We rented through argusrentals.com and they covered the CDW, plus many other extra's. If you join their club, free, you get a cheaper rate.
They are a broker and we got our car through Alamo in Paris and England and saved overa $100 on each rental.

If you have an umbrella policy through homeowners insurance if may cover you for liability if you injure someone.

You have to be careful and check for yourself since the rules are always changing. When I went to Ireland a few years ago my credit cards covered international rentals but in the fine print Ireland was excluded, apparently because of large claims in the past. It turned out that for some unknown reason for the company I used at that time Mastercard would cover you but Visa would not.

It is important to make sure what type of insurance you are talking about, the credit card insurance is only for damage to the rental car but does not cover injuries and damage to other cars. A big gap is that it does not cover the loss of use of the rental car so if you damage one and it takes two weeks to get it repaired then the rental car company will charge you for two weeks rental at their highest rate.

If I remember correctly the Irish law required moderate liability insurance to be included with the rental car coverage.

Greg