Quote Me Happy did, and then didn't! Help please

TeeKay10

Hi all,

I've a long-winded car insurance query I hope someone can help with please?

I have been a car insurance customer of 'QMH' for the past 2 years without any problems. They sent my renewal price of £278 by email on 18th October. Renewal date is today, 14th November.

After getting the renewal price in Oct, I went online a couple of weeks later to get quotes elsewhere, and I also went onto QMH to see how much extra it would be to change the usage from SDPC to business use. I am thinking of starting a cleaning business and just wanted to see the costs of it in advance. It of course put the price up, although only by £20. However, like I say, it was just a speculative enquiry for future reference to get an idea of initial outlay etc, and although cheap, I don't want to fork out an extra £20 until necessary. I took the business use off and left it at that. The price went back to £278. After checking the other companies, QMH came out cheapest so I thought 'Great, no need to worry, it's set to auto renew'.

However, I've recently done a balance transfer with the card that QMH have on file, and I didn't have enough money on it so I went online to enter new card details.

Prior to clicking 'Buy Now' I thought I'd just see how much it would be to add my partner as a named driver (of course, they are TPO if they drive mine on their own policy). They don't drive my car often, but having read things on here I saw that it can even be cheaper sometimes, so I was just 'playing around' with the quote as I'm sure lots of you do as well, with job descriptions and so on.

Unfortunately it put the price up to approx £310, (£32 more than renewal) so I took it off, expecting the quote to revert back to the £278. Nope, it came down to £304! I went back through the quote to double check I'd done nothing wrong, which I hadn't, but I couldn't get the price to go back to £278 whatever I did!

I then happened to notice that they had my car valued at £8,000 for some reason, although it's only worth about £5,000 so, trying to be all honest and above board, I changed it. The price went up to £306! :eek: I thought that common sense would say that it would reduce the quote, not increase it, else we'd all be saying that our cars were worth more than they actually are!!! :mad:

I read and re-read the quote but to no avail, and by now it was getting late (this was last night) and I wanted to go to bed so I emailed them more or less the same query as here, transferred £310 into the account I wasn't going to use (I didn't want to use the correct card as I thought that by doing so it would mean that I have 'accepted' the quote) and just waited until this morning to see what transpired.

Auto renewal came (begrudgingly thankfully, as I was at work early!) and sure enough they have taken more than the original renewal email states, they have taken £305.80 - a figure that has come from frick knows where!!! (Plus a 1.5% CC charge I hadn't realised about... :mad:)

They have replied to the email saying basically because I amended the quote, hard luck! Here's the exact words:
I'm sorry to hear that your premium changed when you tried to updated your details.

If you attempt make a change or indeed make a change to a Quotemehappy.com policy, our system will recalculate the overall premium using any new information you’ve entered, along with the current insurance ratings.

Please note insurance ratings do change on a daily basis which can have an effect on the premium price.

I hope this explains the process for you now and if you need any further help please let us know."

I understand all of that, but this was on the same flippin day!!! Even if it wasn't on the same day then surely they should still honour the original renewal quote when absolutely nothing has changed? I thought all quotes were valid for a set amount of days anyway?

All I was doing in effect, was 'browsing'. They don't have a telephone service, else I'd have rang up to get the info.

You wouldn't go into say, Tesco, checkout a trolley load priced at £30, add some beans, change your mind then have to pay more than £30 for the original trolley load would you?! This is in essence what has happened!

QMH aren't budging. I have re-emailed them reiterating that surely I should be entitled to the original price as nothing has changed, but to no avail.

I'm having to stick with them for now as I can't afford to buy another policy whilst they faff about refunding me in full. They will also probably want an admin fee for doing so now, leaving more more out of pocket!

I've had no problem with them before and am even happy to stay with them if they refund me the extra that they took.

Can anyone help please? Sorry for the long post

*Scarlett

I don't know how the qmh website works but surely if there is no option to contact by phone then the only option is to explore options online and doing this speculatively should not affect your renewal price.

But hearing this, in future it might be better to do a q as a new customer not associated with the policy.

If all the details on the renweal are the same and they won't honor the price then I would make a formal complaint and escalate to FOS if necessary.

http://financial-ombudsman.org.uk/