Car insurance quote changing from price comparison when buying

evansguy123

I went to a price comparison site (comparethemarket) to get a quote for car insurance.  The cheapest (from Kwikfit) was for £350.  I then clicked through and was immediately shown a price of £380.

I would understand the price difference if I'd been asked some additional questions on the Kwikfit site or changed some answers - but neither of these happened.

None of the language on the price comparison site indicated that it was a "representative"/"indicative" price nor can I see this referenced in their T&Cs.

This feels very much like a "bait and switch".

Is it legal for an insurer to advertise one price (on a price comparison site) then charge a higher price when you try to buy?

elsien

Have you tried going through Kwik Fit directly, not via the comparison site, and see what that gives you?

DullGreyGuy

evansguy123 said:
Is it legal for an insurer to advertise one price (on a price comparison site) then charge a higher price when you try to buy?

There are different ways different companies integrate to comparison sites. The parent company of this site, Money Supermarket, used to "estimate" premiums, in many cases with no reference to the insurers in question hence how they kept listing Direct Line without their permission. 

These days things tend to be better with APIs (or in a few cases screen scraping) but in principle some could still be doing a simplified initial quote and only doing a full quote when the customer clicks through. This is likely to be particularly true if you are asking for a loan to pay monthly as you wouldn't want 100+ credit reference checks each time you get a quote on monthly payments. 

Ultimately log a complaint with the two companies if you want to but really isn't it more a case of going back to the list and seeing if with the revised price you still want to buy from them or the next one on the list?

Mildly_Miffed

So go back to the comparison results...

Is KF still the best value (which is NOT the same thing as cheapest)?
If so, then buy it anyway.
If not, buy the one that is.

(Personally, I wouldn't go to KF for tyres or exhaust, due to their appalling reputation for upselling and for quality - so why would I buy insurance that's marketed under their brand?)

Comparison results often hide a lot of detail that may make you step back from a nominally attractive quote, when you look in more detail. You'll probably find that the £350 figure excludes some £30 optional extra which the detail has added when you click through. Remove that, if you don't want it, and it'd be back down.

DullGreyGuy

Mildly_Miffed said:

Personally, I wouldn't go to KF for tyres or exhaust, due to their appalling reputation for upselling and for quality - so why would I buy insurance that's marketed under their brand?

Having worked with a company that specialised in providing white label travel insurance, you'd be surprised how poor the correlation is between brand and insurance... They predominately sold a fixed product, you could brand it however you wanted, add marketing messages at the start etc but the key terms were what they were unless you were a big brand. They did however offer extras like how strictly rules are applied, the priority ranking on the telephone number associated with your brand etc. This set the wholesale price of the policy and the brand could then choose what markup they wanted to add on top. 

One brand - a company well known for being a budget brand took all the optional extras and basically sold it at cost.

Second brand - a company that sees itself as a consumer champion/heavily customer focused, took none of the optional extras and sold it for the highest price of any of their clients. 

There can certainly be a broader principle that you dont want to give your money to a certain firm but its not always true to assume the service will be the same when its a different part or a white label for a brand

Arklight

Insurance from Kwik Fit. What can go wrong?