Car insurance and changing excess/start dates

[Deleted User]

Are you allowed to change the dates/excesses to see what gives the best price? I have been checking the price difference for different excesses, dates into the future and sometimes if driveway parking/road parking brings considerable differences. Which has probably resulted in a crap ton of quotes in the course of a day, information wasn't false considering my circumstances however. I see some threads here where the OPs ended up getting blacklisted from insurance indefinitely for doing so.

chrisw

You can't change dates too much as the vehicle should be continuously insured unless it's SORN off road. No problem playing around with excesses as that doesn't alter any material risk.

Changing where the car is parked does alter the risk and may flag up to the insurance provider. You may not necessarily get blacklisted but you may have to provide evidence when you take out the policy. It might also cause difficulties if something happens to the vehicle when it was parked in the opposite location.

Safest just to use fake details whilst playing with the numbers.

Sandtree

Pricing is considered a commercial decision and so beyond the PRA wanting to ensure insurers can afford to pay claims its generally fairly unregulated from an insurance perspective (obviously things like the ASA will be interested in advertising messages etc).

As Chris mentions, there are some factors that insurers will consider immutable (either you've had an incident or you haven't) and so different quotes with different values are a big red flag. Others, namely excess are a pure "commercial" decision and so seeing the impact of £100 xs -v- £1,000 xs is more reasonable. Not every insurer has amazing cutting edge IT systems with AI learning that can deal with this level of analysis on the volumes of data they have to deal with and so there are some with much more simplistic approaches that say anyone getting a 3rd quote of the day will get penalised.

It could also be argued that quote manipulation could be an indicator of financial distress (why spend 3 hours to save £5? Most would say your time is worth more) which in itself tends to raise prices because of the fraud risk.

There are ways to try and "beat the system" using dummy data, masked IPs etc but a number of insurers include a random element in pricing to test customer elasticity/pricing sensitivity and so doing all this and doing one quote with your real details still may not give the best answer.