How to get out of this car insurance renewal nightmare
SprostonGreenHead
Forumite 121 Posts
My insurance for my Merc E-class estate is expensive. I’m 41 but only held my license for 3yr 10m, self employed, I’ve got a medical condition I notify dvla about (albeit with no restrictions) and I’m in a South London postcode - all stuff that pushes the price up.
last year, I insured this car for £800. Esure sent my renewal asking for just shy of £1500. I immediately checked on price comparison websites (although I couldn’t quote it for the day mine was going to expire as the date picker didn’t go far enough into the future) and got quotes for 800-900.
The next day, I call esure, ask them to check the renewal quote is valid, and upon being told it was, I told them to shove it.
I then go back to the price comparison sites, and they’re all quoting 1200-2000! I call a few, and they confirm their quotes have changed, and in many cases doubled. One of them explains that they look at what other companies are going to charge and charge similar. A way of saying “everyone wants to rip you off, so we do too”.
It would appear to me that esure have shared my renewal price at cancellation and now I can’t get anything like a reasonable deal. I also now have my current policy expiring on 14th Nov, so I need to sort it before then. Every day since this, I’ve been renewing the profe comparison site quotes, and they remain ridiculously high.
How do I get out of this nightmare and get a reasonable quote?
last year, I insured this car for £800. Esure sent my renewal asking for just shy of £1500. I immediately checked on price comparison websites (although I couldn’t quote it for the day mine was going to expire as the date picker didn’t go far enough into the future) and got quotes for 800-900.
The next day, I call esure, ask them to check the renewal quote is valid, and upon being told it was, I told them to shove it.
I then go back to the price comparison sites, and they’re all quoting 1200-2000! I call a few, and they confirm their quotes have changed, and in many cases doubled. One of them explains that they look at what other companies are going to charge and charge similar. A way of saying “everyone wants to rip you off, so we do too”.
It would appear to me that esure have shared my renewal price at cancellation and now I can’t get anything like a reasonable deal. I also now have my current policy expiring on 14th Nov, so I need to sort it before then. Every day since this, I’ve been renewing the profe comparison site quotes, and they remain ridiculously high.
How do I get out of this nightmare and get a reasonable quote?
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The customer service agents have no clue whatsoever how the prices are made up, some degree of what can influence the price, but thats as close as it gets.
So forget the conspiracy theories, they are just that.
When you get your insurance quotes can also effect your price as more risk averse people get their renewal prices earlier and therefore the prices tend to be cheaper around the 26 days out and can then increase the closer you get.
Have you done the typical things like having an experienced driver as a named driver, made sure the occupation is the cheapest variant you can justifiably used, have selected the correct location for where the vehicle is stored (e.g. often on the road is cheaper than on a driveway) etc? Obviously all these things have to be true.
There is also this (which granted, is 11 years old, but the article states the companies involved could essentially continue using the practice so long as the data was “anonymised”). I also think your sweeping statement about what customer service people do and don’t know is a bit of a generalisation. I’m sure for the vast majority it’s true, however I think it would be naive to assume not a single customer service operative for an insurance company has such an interest in their work that they might attempt to find out.
26 days out was a few days ago. It made no difference unfortunately. I’ve used the best job title I can (using the handy article on this very site). On the named driver thing, there really is nobody I can use for that.
search for Guardian article: “
OFT warns car insurers against using data that could lead to price-fixing
There are of course specialists in every area (claims, fraud etc) but the chances you spoke to more than a general advisor who wanted you off the call as soon as possible to meet their targets if you weren't buying anything is very remote.
The only chance of sharing data would be across the various brands of the same insurer and there are a few of these. These prices will all change in similar ways at the same time as they all use the same actuarial back end system with slight variances for the different brands.
Esure at one stage also owned 50% of GoCompare which it has since sold due to conflicts of interest.
Insurers are very protective of their pricing, to the degree that some such as Aviva and Direct line will not appear on comparison sites because they try to actively block screen scrapers where competitors try to find out their pricing. Screen scraping was how the early comparison sites worked and it was blocking the insurers ability to spot their competition trying to find out their prices.
If you want to stick to your conspiracy theories then you are welcome to. Its not going to change anything and all I can do is tell you how it actually is.
I refuse to accept “leaving it too late” is why my quotes are doubling, when “too late” was over 30 days before the current policy expires. The initial £800 quote I got was invalid anyway as the latest date on the date selector was a say before my existing one expired.
I guess even if insurers don’t share data, it’s not too difficult for them to run my details through a quote comparison website themselves.
Something very wrong is going on when my renewal doubles (with an extra year of holding the license, an extra year no claims, depreciation of the car value, and all other things the same) then upon cancellation, every competitor seemingly follows suit after quoting less.
This is an awful system, and simply cannot be risk-based. Of course we all know this, but how do I navigate out of this trap, which I assume could even last longer than just this year.
It does have the flavour of something else having changed. I'm not saying that anything has changed, but it does give that impression.
Do the quotations not confirm that they are valid for xx number of days?
I have no simple answer, although if insurers were running a pricing cartel, there are monopolies regulations that apply. I would doubt that the person that you spoke with had a genuine insight into the insurer's pricing algorithms.
All I can suggest is:
Best of luck
SC
It is not simply risk based and never claims to be.
Slightly differently to @400ixl the very large consumer insurance group I worked with didnt leave it just to the actuaries to calculate the pricing. You did have the risk pricing that they'd have calculated but that itself was adjusted for commercial views... this could be intentionally overloading TPFT/TPO coverages as it doesnt fit your image of mass-exclusive brand or it could be slightly underloading prestige brands of vehicles as they do fit. The actuaries/pricing statisticians then go away work out the impact on the book and ensure as a whole it remains stable
Competitor analysis does form a part of that but its not on a quote by quote basis, there were third party companies that we'd pay to run price comparisons for us on customer segments we are interested in (or actively disinterested in) and that could feed into the decisions of where pricing needed to be tweeked.
Above risk premium you then have operational loading, profit margin loading, premium tax etc to add.
Then there was the controversial bit... propensity modelling and elasticity. Insurers want to know how price sensitive you are and how long you are likely to stick around. Before new customer discounting was banned you could potentially identify someone who's going to stay for many years and isnt particularly price sensitive and so its worth offering them a lower initial price to get them in the door and then walk the price up as they keep renewing each year. Undoubtably this is still happening but the price walking cannot happen and so the models will have to have changed.
As to the original question... have you just done a single quote with one renewal date and then X weeks later done another quote with a different start date? Or did you do multiple quotes? Insurers are concerned about "rate raiding" (the very idea you suggested) and also fraud and so typically if someone does lots of quotes tweaking different elements (eg job title) then they often see prices escalate and insurers stopping offering quotes.
It seems that running too many quotes could be the issue here?
Maybe abstain from the comparison sites for a week?
When returning to quotes perhaps you should start with some of the companies that aren't on the comparison sites and won't already have seen multiple quotes from you?