Car hire Alicante airport

[GhostCastle]

I hope someone will help me with this. I’m looking to hire a car from Alicante airport, but I’m finding the insurance terms a bit confusing:

Insurance
There is full insurance with Zero Excess liability on this rental. This means you will not be charged an excess in the event of damage or theft of the vehicle. This includes damage to the underside, tyres and glass parts of the vehicle (including the windscreen). Certain parts of the vehicle (and certain incidents) may be excluded but these can be covered by purchasing our optional Top-Up insurance.

What is Top-Up cover? Is this going to cost a lot? Should I pay for this cover?

TIA

Top up cover is a ruse to make the rental look cheaper than it is with the aim of getting you to pay X euros a day extra in the hope that you don't realise that X x Y days plus the original amount you were quoted is more than you expected to pay.

It depends on what the exclusions are as to whether you should pay it, because its normally tyres, glass and the underside but these are covered.

The amount could be anything but will be presented as X euros per day to make it sound like not much but if it's a week it's going to be quite a lot of money.

You can get excess cover in the UK much cheaper than the hire car company but then you will have to leave a 1000 euro plus deposit and refuse their cover which could be an extremely hard sell depending on which company it is.

Moneysavingexpert.com has a good guide to all the pitfall to be aware of when hiring cars abroad, how to avoid unexpected costs and also reduce the risk of being charged for damage.

Thanks for your reply. We probably ended up paying more to hire a car in the end because we used a well known company that also operates in the UK. We took loads of photos of any damage we spotted when we collected the vehicle to cover ourselves.