5 May 2010
(source: in-house)
Car Insurers
To find the best car insurers in the UK, what should you do? Use a
price comparison site or go direct?
Well, if saving as much money as possible is the driving force behind
your choice of policy, then, clearly, the more prices from lots of car insurers that you can look at, the better your
chances of shaving as much as you can off the cost of your cover. The
only way to do this effectively is to use a car insurance comparison
system.
But if you're wanting to get a well-rounded policy that offers more
attractive features than the more basic, cheapest policies, then going
direct to leading car insurers is
wiser.
Why do we argue thus? Well, the biggest car
insurers tend to provide excellent cover at competitive rates. If you
go direct to one of these well known motor insurance providers, you can
be sure of a good deal both in terms of the price and the cover you're
getting.
If you find car insurers through
a price comparison site, their focus on low price mitigates against you
finding better quality cover through them. Yes, some of them offer some
policy information to help you to check which policies best match your
requirements but this information is limited and to compare policies
that are not clustered at the cheap end of the market is hard to do
through one of these comparison sites.
The policies that myriad UK car
insurers offer, as you'd expect, vary hugely in terms of the cover
provided and in their various other features such as, for example, the
size of the excess. Lump all these different policies together
then compare their cost and, not surprisingly, you get a wide spread of
prices from these numerous car insurers.
This is what price comparison sites do. When you look at this range of
prices uncritically, it's easy to reach the view that had you not used
a price comparison site, you would not have found the most competitive
quote.
Yet what represents the most competitive quote is meaningless unless
you qualify it. The cheapest quote on a a price comparison site is the
most competitive quote out of several other paired down equally basic
policies. But a slightly more expensive quote as found on a price
comparison site may be associated with a much more inclusive policy
than that provided by the cheapest priced quote. Thus, competitive
pricing is not an absolute measure, it's a relative measure that needs
to be considered alongside the cover you're getting.
The latter point illustrates that the premise on which price comparison
sites are based - that price is really the only significant factor on
which to base your choice of cover - is wrong. Therefore, if you
do use a price comparison site, make sure you know exactly what you're
getting before buying from any car insurers found in this way.
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