Car insurance - dodgy comparisons?

DrPaul

As many times before, I just went to renew my car insurance - so off to MSE and thence to the comparison sites.

Two firms consistently came out best - Insure2drive and GoGirl.

The trouble is, I go to their sites, confirm my details, then go to pay. I then get a message saying redirecting to the payment site, but after a few moments I suddenly get a message saying "we can't insure you" - no explanation offered.

What a con! Surely it's fraudulent to top the comparison lists with prices that can't actually be bought?

InsideInsurance

It would only be fraudulant if it is intentional rather than a system bug or integration issue.

They are both just trading styles of Sabre which is a moderate sized insurer but more of a niche player. They are owned ultimately by Capita which is a massive organisation.

They dont come anywhere close to top for me and so clearly isnt a way of them trying to simply mop up everything they can

DrPaul

Thanks for the feedback.

They've actually replied to my email asking for my postcode - it's a central London one that other web sites have occasionally refused to recognise, so maybe I'll have to let them off the hook

whatmichaelsays

Comparison sites make a lot of assumptions when providing quotes, which increases the pool of insurers that they can work with (every insurer has its own individual quirks and it would be unfeasible for a comparison site to account for every one).

It sounds like you have come up on the wrong side of one of those assumptions.

DrPaul

Trouble is, exactly the same data was used to provide a quoted price on the comparison site, data and quote were re-confirmed on their web site, but then it couldn't retrieve the quote when I came to pay.

However things have been resolved. I got an email giving me a number to phone (this is an online-only insurer btw) where they would process things manually.

Took me a while to convince the person who actually answered the phone - "we don't do quotes by phone" - but in the end they took my money and have emailed me the documents.