Are there any Car Insurance gems out there?

Dawn1966

I'm looking to renew car insurance, my current provider is nearly £80 more expensive than the cheapest quote by Aviva/Quote Me Happy/General Accident & Churchill. I always look at reviews and read comments on firms FB pages to get an idea of their popularity, but it would seem that ALL insurers are dodgy by either taking additional payments, dragging out the claims process, stopping insurance without notice and other complaints.
Are you able to recommend your insurer??

MovingForwards

Never had any problems over the years with insurers, but then I've never made a claim. 
Currently with Churchill, previous policies were AXA, Zenith and other big name companies.

lisyloo

I am currently with Halifax.
recently had windscreen chip repaired for free, no excess, no effect on NCD.
had to up my mileage, cost £2.82 plus £25 mid term admentment fee,
i am very please with that (obviously I’d rather have no fee at all but that’s at the low end). Did have to call to get that changed but didn’t take long at all.

pallyman

Churchill & Direct Line have been great over the years for me.

Grabs39

We're with Direct Line.  I doubt they're the cheapest but we've found them to be excellent.

A couple of years back we had a minor collision with another car.  The owner of the car was remarkably unpleasant and started court proceedings against us, even though the insurers were dealing with it (and he'd claimed on his own insurance as well!).  Direct Line's legal team sorted it all out which was reassuring (we'd never been sued before so it was a huge shock to receive a court summons).  They also collected our car from home, delivered a hire car and fixed it all with a guarantee on the paintwork they had resprayed with absolutely no fuss.

They also recently wrote to me offering me some money back if I hadn't travelled much last year.  As I work from home now my mileage has reduced so I just had to input a new estimated mileage on their webform and they refunded me some of my premium.

We also insure our dogs with them, and have had a couple of claims which they just pay out in a couple of weeks, absolutely no bother.

Frontera2

Can’t recommend AXA highly enough. Had an accident in France some years ago and they couldn’t have been more helpful if they tried. 

Neil49

I'm with LV and they get good reviews with Which magazine. 

Sandtree

Dawn1966 said:

I'm looking to renew car insurance, my current provider is nearly £80 more expensive than the cheapest quote by Aviva/Quote Me Happy/General Accident & Churchill. I always look at reviews and read comments on firms FB pages to get an idea of their popularity, but it would seem that ALL insurers are dodgy by either taking additional payments, dragging out the claims process, stopping insurance without notice and other complaints.
Are you able to recommend your insurer??

So you want the cheapest price possible but great service?

Most big names, like those you've mentioned, generally will be fine and are unlikely to engage in the bottom feeder activities around looking for minor errors in the declarations etc but you should always be giving accurate accidents anyway rather than a best guess.

There are insurers aimed at High Net Worth individuals and you will find they have much higher levels of cover and service (eg HNW Car insurance will cover you driving any other car not owned by you on a fully comp basis and give a like to like replacement car whilst yours is under a claim etc) however you pay the price for this exclusive product.