Every car we hire out is fully insured and road-legal. What most people actually want to know is simpler than that: if something happens to the car, how much of it am I responsible for?
This page answers that in plain language. No small print, no surprises at the counter — there is no counter. We hand you the keys ourselves.
Included in the price of every vehicle, with nothing to add:
You do not need to buy anything for the car to be insured. The options below only change how much you would pay if there were an incident.
Cover applies within the Maltese Islands only. Gozo, Malta and Comino, including the ferry between them. It cannot be extended beyond Maltese territory under any circumstances — the vehicle must not leave the islands.
The excess is the maximum you pay towards damage. The insurance covers everything above it.
How it works in practice. You misjudge a narrow lane in Xagħra and scrape a wing mirror and the door.
The excess is a ceiling on your liability, not a fee. If nothing happens, you pay nothing at all.
Your exact excess is shown on your quote, before you confirm anything — along with the option below to reduce it.
For a modest daily charge, your excess drops substantially.
Optional for drivers aged 25 and over, at €10 per day. Add it when you book and it appears as its own line on your quote, so you can see exactly what it costs — and exactly what your excess becomes — before you decide.
Is it worth it? Over a week it costs a fraction of what it takes off your maximum exposure. Whether that trade is worth making is genuinely your call — a confident driver used to narrow roads may reasonably decline it. Gozo's lanes are narrow, walls are close and stone does not give. Most of our damage claims are wing mirrors and door scrapes, not collisions.
A daily charge applies, and your excess is set accordingly. This one is not optional.
Our insurer requires additional cover for drivers under 25 — it is a condition of the policy, not a decision we make.
It goes by your age on the day the hire starts. If you turn 25 before your pickup date, this does not apply to you at all, even if you were 24 when you booked.
It is applied automatically once a date of birth is entered, and it is included in the total you see from that point onward. Nothing is added later.
We cannot hire a vehicle to a driver under 21, in any circumstance.
This is an insurance and licensing limit, not a policy of ours, and there is no version of it we can make an exception to — not for an experienced driver, not with a larger deposit, not with an older driver also named on the hire.
If this affects your group, an older member of the party can hire the car and drive, or we can quote you for transfers instead. Get in touch and we will help you work something out.
Every driver — main or additional — needs a full licence issued at least two years before the hire begins. A licence held for less than two years does not meet our insurer's conditions, regardless of the driver's age.
Licences from outside the EU are accepted only if they are written in English. If yours is in any other language or script, you also need an International Driving Permit, which must be presented together with your original licence — the permit on its own is not a licence and is not valid without it. Arrange the permit in your own country before you travel; it cannot be obtained here.
Your licence is checked when we review your booking, not on the day you arrive. That check is what decides whether the hire is approved. We would far rather tell you there is a problem while you can still arrange something than turn you away at the door with your luggage in the car — so upload a clear photo of the licence when you book, and if anything is unclear we will contact you before approving.
Bring the physical licence with you as well. We look at it again on delivery, and the licence in your hand is always the final word.
When we deliver the vehicle, we place a pre-authorisation on a credit or debit card in the main driver's name. This is a hold, not a payment. The money is not taken — your bank simply reserves it against your available balance.
The amount held matches your maximum liability — so it is exactly the excess that applies to your hire, whichever cover you have chosen. Reduce your excess and the hold reduces with it. The figure is shown to you before you confirm.
The Dacia Jogger is the one exception, and is always held at the full standard amount regardless of cover. Its keys are expensive to replace, and lost or damaged keys are not covered by insurance — that gap sits outside the excess, so the hold stays at the full amount.
The hold is released automatically 31 days after it is placed. That timing is set by the banking system, not by us: we cannot release it early, shorten it, or speed it up once the car is back, and neither can your bank's branch staff. It simply expires. We would rather tell you this now than have you wonder in week three.
A small daily charge, per additional driver.
Only named drivers are insured. If someone who is not on the hire agreement drives the car and something happens, the insurance does not respond at all — and that is not an excess-sized problem, it is the whole cost of the vehicle. It is never worth the few euro a day.
Every additional driver needs to meet the same conditions as the main driver: aged 21 or over, licence held for at least two years, and their own age band applies. If your extra driver is 23 and you are 40, the under-25 cover applies to the hire.
You can add extra drivers when you book, or on delivery — bring the licence with you.
Even with the excess reduced, the cover does not extend to everything:
Ferry crossings between Gozo and Malta are fine — the car is insured on both islands and on the crossing itself.
At the start of every hire, photographs of the vehicle are uploaded to your photoblog. That set of photos is the only official record of the car's condition — it is what we work from, and what the insurers work from, if a question arises later. A photo on your own phone is not part of it.
It is the driver's responsibility to make sure the upload is done, and to make sure it is complete. Our representative will be there and will help you through it — but the record is yours, and it protects you far more than it protects us.
Photograph the general views, not only the marks. Every panel, all four corners, the wheels, the roof, the interior. It is tempting to photograph only the scratch you noticed and skip the rest, but a clean panel photographed at the start is exactly what proves a mark at the end was not yours. Damage you can see is rarely the thing that gets disputed; it is the unphotographed panel that causes the argument.
The same is done when the car comes back, so the two sets can be compared directly.
Ask us and we will send you your photos from any hire — just get in touch.
If the car develops a fault — it will not start, a warning light comes on, something mechanical goes wrong — that is ours to fix, at no cost to you. Recovery anywhere on Gozo is free and included in every hire. Call us; we live here, and in most cases we can be with you quickly or swap the vehicle.
Excess and insurance only ever come into play for damage, not for the car misbehaving.
We will take it from there and tell you exactly what happens next. You will not be left to work it out from a foreign country.
Insurance wording is dull and consequential in equal measure, which is a bad combination for reading on a phone. If anything above is unclear for your situation, ask us — we would far rather answer a question before you book than sort out a misunderstanding afterwards.