[steamship]

Originally Posted by tintin

The whole sector is a sham, and ripe for the sort of mis-selling investigation that happened with PPI - there's no effective competition, no transparency and a range of pretty dubious anti-competitive practices across the board.

Originally Posted by H-M3

I think insurance need to be regulated more! It’s unbelievable the difference between sister companies.

Have to agree on both points, as I consider them all to a shower of (insert appropriate word)! As well as the points made by everyone so far, the one I can't tolerate, or comprehend is insuring multiple cars.

Take for example my D2. I've had it insured since I bought it with the same company. Always a competitive quote compared to others, and usually when you go to renew, they drop the price bit. Car is insured fully comp, protected NCD and driver only. Fast forward to the S8 and phoned for a quote, and based on previous history with the D2, got an even better price than the D2, and same conditions. Not going to argue with that.

Less than a month ago, I phone them up and ask for a quote. They look through the existing policies I have with them, including house insurance and give me another good competitive quote. Based on that, I go ahead with the purchase and arrange flights, ferries, etc. About a week later, I phone up to confirm the quote and to get the policy started. I'm then told that they can't quote me for the car. But they did the previous week! Ah, but they made a mistake. They didn't check thoroughly enough, and shouldn't have quoted me at all. In fact, they wouldn't even quote me for the car because of its insurance group. Needless to say, I'm getting a bit miffed at this having forked out for all manner of transport relating to it. After about 30 minutes of let's say discussion, and some manager intervention, they agreed to honour the quote.

This is the bit that gets to me about insuring multiple vehicles when I'm the only going to be driving them. Despite quoting lower annual mileages (split between them), I can't drive them at the same time, so why should the premiums still be so high. Each car will be on the road for less time, so theoretically less likely to be in an accident.

Oh, there was one other area, occupation. When I renewed the D2 insurance last year, I just happened to look through the policy document and noticed that my occupation was down as retired. Now when I took out my first insurance with them back in 2012, I said I was unemployed, but somewhere along the line it was changed. Since I was phoning to renew, I pointed out their mistake in my occupation, to which he said 'that will be an extra £70'. It seems that retired people are less prone to having accidents, and since I told them I was unemployed and not retired, I can't change that, as any policy I had after that would be void because of providing false information.

If I had my way, they would be occupying the same spot at the bottom of the sea set aside for all lawyers/solicitors. Even bigger rant than M-H3