Insurance renewal delay

FedUpGrump

My current car insurance is due for renewal in the next month so I looked online at comparison sites and obtained some quotes. This is the optimum time as suggested by MSE. To compare the prices I asked my current insurer what the renewal price would be and they said they couldn't provide this until 21 days before the renewal date. 

Upo  waiting and now that I have received their renewal, the online quotes I previously received have gone up by nearly 20%. Is this common practice as I feel my current insurer has deliberately delayed?

Be grateful for any thoughts. 

chrisw

Yes, I've had it a few times. What I do now is, when the first lot of quotes come up, click through to my preferred insurers website and there's usually an option to save the quote for 30 days.

Then when doing subsequent quotes, if they're the same or cheaper then all well and good. But if they've gone up, I can usually retrieve the original quote saved on the insurers website.

MyRealNameToo

FedUpGrump said:

My current car insurance is due for renewal in the next month so I looked online at comparison sites and obtained some quotes. This is the optimum time as suggested by MSE. To compare the prices I asked my current insurer what the renewal price would be and they said they couldn't provide this until 21 days before the renewal date. 

Upo  waiting and now that I have received their renewal, the online quotes I previously received have gone up by nearly 20%. Is this common practice as I feel my current insurer has deliberately delayed?

Be grateful for any thoughts. 

MSE's advice is currently 20-27 days in advance for Motor Insurance so at 21 days they are in the sweet spot. 

Whilst I agree that buying last minute is worst to suggest that there is a universal best time is fairly unlikely based on my experience of sitting on pricing committees. Each company had a different sweet spot and not all in that date range. Pricing was a weekly meeting so in principle our best price may have been on day 21 but if on day 23 we decided to increase the rates for people in your age group then actually the day 24 quote would have been better than the day 21 because the movement in the age factor is greater than the discount for being on the sweet spot. 

Back in my day we were talking about implementing AI too, one of the ideas was to watch conversion rates and have the system automatically nudge pricing if we were selling too many policies or not enough to certain demographics which would suggest our rates are not aligned to the market or even stop quoting if its way off. So you could be on the sweet spot in terms of timing but if the sale of policies to hot hatch owners was up 400% than normal then the quote on your Polo GTI may well be significantly increased because the firm that normally is best priced for this car has stopped quoting and so your left with quotes from Saga or others who dont really like hot hatch cars. 

MarzipanCrumble

I am old.  I have had accidents over my driving years so I look at service, as well as price.  I would rather go with an actual insurer rather than a third party i.e. RAC, AA.

MyRealNameToo

MarzipanCrumble said:

I am old.  I have had accidents over my driving years so I look at service, as well as price.  I would rather go with an actual insurer rather than a third party i.e. RAC, AA.

Unfortunately many dont seem to know if it's a broker, intermediary or insurer that they are dealing with. I'd also question if the intermediary has full delegated authority is there any material difference between going with an insurer or an MGA