For part of our trip to England later this year, we are planning to rent a car and drive around the Cotswolds. Car rental in England is expensive enough as it is, especially considering the high cost of gas, but the collision damage waiver from the rental companies is a notorious rip-off. I do, however, want some insurance just for peace of mind since we’ll be driving in a foreign country, not to mention on the opposite side of the road. So I’ve been looking into other sources of insurance, including my credit card companies. The issue of car rental insurance has never come up for me before, so I’m a newbie to the ins and outs of who offers what and under what terms.

Finding information about the credit card companies’ car rental insurance policies, however, was no easy feat. For instance, I went to the Web site for my Mastercard’s issuing bank, and car rental insurance wasn’t even listed under the benefits.  I then looked up the MasterCard Web site, and it mentioned that some types of cards offer car rental insurance, but that you should contact your issuing bank for details. There were no details about the policy in the benefits guide, just this one-sentence description:

Car Rental Collision Damage Waiver Insurance
Pays for covered damages (physical damage and theft) to a rental vehicle when your eligible MasterCard card is used to initiate and pay for the entire rental transaction.

So I called up the issuing bank and talked to a customer rep, who informed me that my card indeed does offer some sort of car rental insurance. She quickly read the description of the policy off the screen to me over the phone, which of course is no help at all when you want to comb through the fine print to see if a policy actually offers you enough protection. So I asked her if I can find this policy online or have the details e-mailed to me (I am, after all, a cardholder and the bank already has my e-mail address). After a slight hesitation, she told me no. She did, however, give me yet another phone number to call for more information about the card’s benefits.

At this point, the search seemed to be turning into a wild goose chase. I called that number and was greeted with an automated answering system reading off the exact same policy to me that the customer rep did. Fortunately, at the end of the message, it actually gave me a Web address to go for more information. It wasn’t anything obvious, and it wasn’t something I could find just by clicking around or doing searches on the MasterCard Web site. Heck, I don’t even remember the URL now, but fortunately I viewed the PDF of the policy with my Google Docs viewer, so Google Docs saved a copy. It turns out I had already automatically qualified for the coverage when I reserved the car with that credit card, but of course, finding out that I had coverage — and what kind of coverage it is — was much more difficult than it should’ve been. With the hoops I had to jump through to find that policy, I can’t help but get the impression that the credit card company really, really doesn’t want me to use the CDW coverage, or even know about it.

That brings up one of my annoyances — the opaque nature of useful, empowering information online in a day and age where such things should be required to be easily accessible. Sure, the credit card company can say that its policy is online, but when its Web site gives me no hint of where that policy is, and even the people working at one of its issuing banks can’t tell me where to go for the file, what good does it do me? We  see this over and over — crucial information that technically is out there and available to the public, but in practice is obscured behind layers of bad information architecture (sometimes intentionally so). Forget greater government transparency through putting more documents online, let’s start with something as simple as a pamphlet telling me about the goods and services I already own.