This is all based on a personal experience from the last couple of days.
As a piece of general advice to all my students who ask, " go to all the price comparison websites to get prices for your car insurance"!
Don't trust Car Insurance Price Comparison sites! Don't take things at face value and shop around EVERYWHERE.
Why?
Well, not all comparison sites are created equal. You will find each site has different prices for even the same car insurance companies. You are actually shopping around during your shopping around.
My experience from the last few days has made something quite unbelievable come to light. Something that is really, REALLY important to share with you.
This all started on Friday when I was helping my newly qualified to drive niece getting her first car and some car insurance quotes to see how things would look for her financially. So we went to all the usual suspects, Compare the Market, Money Supermarket, Go Compare etc and after tweaking a few things got some pretty competitive quotes for the car we were looking to purchase. The type of prices that didn't set our hair on fire with the number quoted. We set the start date to about a week away to give us some time to get things in place and from there the whole thing started to gather pace and before we knew it the car was bought and we were ready to get the car insured. Keep it in mind that the price quoted for insuring the car was £1650 roughly. Which I thought was actually pretty good considering some of the horror stories we have all heard recently. What I didn't expect is what happened when we tried to move the start date for the policy forward and the subsequent discovery that has prompted me to write this as more of a cautionary note than anything else.
So, we are back at the laptop again and starting the process of moving the start date up. We went straight back to the most competitive option and made the necessary adjustment to the start date and started the requote process. The price that was generated approximately 20hrs after the initial quote saw it rise to a staggering £2800 and change!!!!
Now, I can understand a little fluxuation based on the change but £1200???
We started tweaking the information the quote was based on to see if we could improve the price but it just continued to get worse. Luckily however, we had taken down the details of the car insurance company and had started to look at them on an individual basis and as a result had a saved quote with them based on our original information. We returned to their own site and updated the details provided to them for a more immediate start to the policy and their price came back at a little over £1700. That was a bit more like it I thought and my niece is now on the road in her first car.
The bottom line is really simple. Don't trust car insurance price comparison sites! Do the homework and your due diligence. It will always pay off.
I wrote to the website in questions Customer Services Team and got a response back. One which illustrated that they clearly didn't understand the issue or acknowledge that their system and service needs addressed to be more inline with the companies they are displaying prices for and more fair to those that are using their services.
The way the insurance sector is right now is nothing short of shambolic and I will be chasing this up with the FCA and hopefully have something done about what is now turning into a car insurance rip-off culture here in the UK.
I will do my best to update the blog with more information as and when I find it.
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