Boat Insurance Comparison

djhops

Hi, I've read your articles about minimising your insurance costs and had taken this advice with my car no problem, but when it comes to insure my narrowboat there are no boat insurers that are playing ball it seems.

There's a couple of sites stating boat insurance comparisons but when I tried getting a list of quotes from two of them, they each only came up with 2 quotes yet there's loads of boat insurance companies out there?!

Very strange! The only half decent thing I found was some advice to help me get a cheaper quote (Mercia Marine Boat Insurance... resources tab / 'key price determinants' article)... but this this expects me to go to lots of sites individually and repost all the information... very tedious! There meant to be 300k+ boats registered in the UK, why no proper comparison website??

Norfolk_Jim

Presumably they dont feel the need to pay comparison websites a commission for the business. Its still a niche market compared to things like motor, building or contents

InsideInsurance

300,000 boats is not a particularly large number for the whole market. You not only have to look at the volume of owners but the proportion of people that switch providers regularly. For Car insurance its something in the region of 30% but for Home it is closer to 10% and Caravan is something tiny like 2%. You are potentially therefore looking at a potential market in the X0,000 space or smaller. To get an aggregator working properly you need (1) a company to develop the comparison engine and (2) every broker/ insurer to adjust their systems to interface with the aggregator. For the size of market it most likely doesnt stack up.

There probably are a number of psuedo aggregators out there, ie brokers that display the results from their panel of insurers in the same way as an aggregator does. The key difference between the two is with an aggregator you go off site to buy and you pay the company you've selected where as a psuedo aggregator site is simply a broker and so you are buying on the site thats quoted you, you pay them etc. Inevitably these pseudo aggregator sites have smaller panels as there will be insurers that offer Direct Only offerings or have exclusive products with certain distributors etc which wont appear on the brokers list.