Car insurance

[anneed]

Phoned Sainsbury's for a quick quote on car insurance. Quick? Hah - you'd think I was applying for a job with MI5. Was kept on the phone answering questions for so long I nearly lost the will to live. I expected the usual things like do you hold a full licence, do you have any unspent convictions (no, by the way) but not only did they want to know the year in which I passed my driving test but also the month - well, can you remember yours?? What year and month did I buy my car and how much was it - exactly - oh and what gender am I and what is my marital status? Mind your own business, what does this have to do with getting a car insurance quote?

After all that their best quote was still more than £100 what I'll be paying to stay with Tesco so I said no thanks. Mind you, they were better than Saga who quoted well over £200 more. How can that be?

I expect you will say I should have gone online to a price comparison website but after this experience I'm sticking with good old Tesco, at least for another year.

[Stephen]

Give Direct Line a go for a quote annie. We were with RAC up untill this month. They didn't want to play ball with negotiating a sensible price or interested in keeping my custom so we walked. Their loss.

[Mervyn and Trish]

We had a bad experience with Saga and wouldn't touch them with a barge pole again. Got a good price one year and a huge increase the next. But it came with a "we'll beat any other price guarantee". However when we got 16 better prices on a comparison site they wouldn't take a screen shot as evidence, or even input our data into the site themselves to check, and wanted a written quote through the post as evidence. So we walked. And will never walk back.

[oldbluefox]

We had a similar experience with Direct Line. The first year we had a good quote and accepted it. The next year's quote was eye-wateringly high so I got a few quotes from price comparison sites and rang up DL. Their attitude was if you have better quotes then go with them. They were not one bit interested and I believe this is the way most insurance companies behave. For one year you will get a good price, the next year it goes through the roof. The best tactic seems to be to check what everybody else is offering and move your insurance accordingly. Loyalty to one brand nowadays seems to count for nothing.

[Ranchi]

New custom is the insurance companies’ new mantra ( sounds like a cruise company- ‘can’t use this discount with any other’). Using the telephone has the advantage that you may be able to haggle but online has the advantage of being able to test quotes for different occupation descriptions. My son’s professional association has advised a number of acceptable alternative descriptions for his job & there is a significant difference in quotes for each. Strangely some companies give the lowest quote for one description whilst others give better quotes for another.