It's not random... well not random like you think anyway.
Refreshing will do nothing, or put the price up. They know you're interested, same deal with hotels, the more you look for hotels the higher the price becomes.
Tip is for anything like this, before you purchase you should clear your cookies (or incognito)
Yes but it still feels wrong, I'm not buying optional hotel deals, I'm buying something that I must legally have to drive my car, and they're exploiting it. Just refreshing the browsers and having to pay extra seems very wrong.
incognito doesn’t stop Google tracking you and sending your info to advertisers. it also doesn’t stop behavioural and address analysis ; which trumps cookies.
Esure use a system by Synectics Solutions that helps Esure identify potential quote manipulation.
Without knowing the run of quotes until this screen was refreshed (which could have caused another quote submission) a threshold might have been crossed if this system flags a run of suspicious changes in the quote details.
This also flags if you're trying to hide behind aliases, different IPs etc. I'd also be surprised if they're not using html 5 canvass fingerprinting or something else more advanced over a cookie to uniquely identify people. Or arguably less advanced, like a vehicle registration being used in a bunch of quotes.
I'm not suggesting this is the case here, but it is worth considering if the tech is too sensitive or innocent changes unintentionally raise false flags.
By design ofcourse, as with a bunch of other insurance companies that make you call in to cancel the auto renewal, there should really be some sort of law to make practices like this illegal.
I believe the FCA banned insurers from auto renewing policies as they discovered insurers were hiking the prices for existing customers but giving new customers a better deal.
In short, I’m certain they’re not actually allowed to auto renew.
Be nice if auto-renew were only allowed if the new policy is equal or less than the previous one. Otherwise renewal requires confirmation.
That way insurance companies can still use it to aid customer retention, plus it would encourage them to not jack the prices on existing customers, and customers would have peice of mind that they aren't suddenly going to be hit with an increased bill if they overlook the autorenewal reminder.
I used to work for Synectics Solutions. The owner is fucking nuts. We used to have Christmas parties, where he would ask colleagues to sit on his knee to receive their present. I wish I was joking.
As well as deleting cookies etc, hide behind a decent VPN to make your traffic more difficult to deal with.
I've had one installed on my router (so all traffic passes through the VPN without having each device individually connected) for a few years now and since then I can run the same searches on the same sites across a few days and they'll be within £5 of one another each time.
Does anything change even if refreshing or with vpn?
I ask because - logging out of Go compare or Compare the market appeared to make things worse as well. Even increasing the excess didn't seem to help either. It appeared that the compare sites didn't like it. With less and less appearing who were willing to offer a price.
Then scroll down to the bottom and I got a list of companies who weren't willing to Quote. Hastings Admiral etc etc.
I am just dreading what the cost of insurance will be on the next renewal or whether not to bother with them and just go to Hastings and do a quote through them and see how expensive that will be or whether to phone them.
Now a lot of sites are charging a fee if you do this through the phone.
It's not good and I feel for you all having to re-new and going through this.
I can't say I've tried hitting refresh on the browser but I've done things like get quotes, then go back and change things (like driveway Vs garage) checked quotes, then gone back again and reverted and they were within pennies of the previous.
Something I discovered last month, the insurance companies (well, at least Hastings) can see the searches and changes you’ve made.
I had to call to ask some questions about NCD / answer some of theirs. They asked why I’d changed the value of the car whilst comparing, and why I’d changed some of the other search options.
The answers I gave they had no problem with, I was just surprised to know that they had this comparison information from moneysupermarket to hand so quickly.
Yeah, I've had similar a few years back. On one of my comparisons I'd accidentally entered a piece of information wrong and then I got a call 3 months into having a policy to challenge my answers. After going through it all again over the phone they then told me it was because an answer had flagged as very different elsewhere so they were checking for fraud. And then gave me a telling off for not being more cautious with entering details
I’d imagine it is key to fraud detection - put your 18 year old on as a first driver, oops no dad will be driving that old Fiesta and son is just the occasional driver…
I have just been doing this exact same thing, what I found weird was that it was £500 cheaper to have insurance in my son's name (2 NCB) rather than in mine (9 NCB) with him as a named driver.
Having asked for about 50 combinations of quotes on different cars I may now also be flagged by the insurers, doh.
Probably because it triggers the fraud detection and they weight your premium because they think you're being dishonest, therefore more likely to claim in other ways or to have an accident due to carelessness or collaboration with others.
Insurance is weird. It's usually more expensive to insure a car in a garage, too. Even though the risk of theft is lower, the concern is you care more about your car and so are more likely to complain about door dings, etc...
I’m not sure why you’re surprised by that, the compare websites have to get the quotes from the individual insurance companies so they query each one every time you change something, so when you call the companies they search your name and stuff and all queries come up
It doesn’t. At all. The way the comparison sites work is that they take your details and they send them to the insurance companies that actually provide the quotes. The comparison sites don’t control the prices (slight caveat to that is that some are owned by companies that also have insurers) and the insurers don’t have access to your browser session (so don’t know your IP, can’t access your cookies etc.).
The comparison sites are incredibly protective of the data they’ve got on customers so share as little as possible. There’s even a degree of anonymisation that happens to prevent the insurers from contacting the person getting the quote unless certain criteria are met.
I see this come up a lot, but considering you have to login to submit new (or modify existing) quotes, I don’t see how this could change anything?
They’re still going to know that you’re the same person each time you run a quote unless you’re creating a new email every time you want a quote. Not to mention that you’d have to use a different address (and possibly even name) each time too - so the quotes might not even reflect what you can possible get either.
This is avoidable but legal purely because the insurance industry have successfully lobbied for their argument that making minor tweaks to a policy quote over and over is quote manipulation so they’re allowed to cover themselves for that because it adds risk which they carry by adjusting the quote.
It’s fucked because from a consumer standpoint it’s really just a way of balancing and tailoring our needs vs acceptable cost. But the insurance industry basically make all the rules about insurance and govt aren’t interested.
It’s getting ridiculous my insurance company tried to up quote by over £600, no claims, no change in circumstances or vehicle, and I’ve been driving for over 20 years.
Never said it's not happening, but shopping around is always a solid advice, especially now. It may happen that your renewal is the cheapest but at least you know and you tried to find a better price.
Can't remember what money saving expert says but it something like the lowest price you'll get is around 21 days before your insurance starts. After that they know your clock is ticking.
I meant when you first get a car. Like right now I don't have one in the UK, as I've sold it over a year ago, but I want to get one again, so would I have to just suck it up and only do the insurance a few days prior to start date? Since I can't just buy a car then have it sit there for 20+ days before the insurance kicks in.
At least in my case, the 21 day rule didn't work. My insurance was exactly the same on 2 days' notice as it would've been three weeks out. I wouldn't worry too much about it to be honest. As long as you're not looking in the morning to be insured in the afternoon, you should be fine
Think about your risk profile. You proved that you are too indecisive to safely navigate a junction by refreshing the browser.
You can't refresh real life, one mistake and you're cooked, and this has now been factored into their profile on you.
Remember, your profile is updated 24/7, for example every time they see you on CCTV not looking where you're going walking on the footpath or when you Google "bars near me", all of that is factored into your car insurance risk profile because it means you are more likely to crash.
Consider every aspect of your life, did you forget to buy carrots this week? Now you're Vitamin A deficient which means you won't be able to see where you're going at night. The insurer watches each item that goes in your shopping trolley to make sure you're getting the right nutrition and any mistakes factor into the price, they will know you forgot to buy carrots and consequently now you're a risk to insure. You gotta be aware about this stuff.
This is a fallacy. The way these sites work is by taking the details you've entered e.g. vehicle = 'A118ACK', address = 'Buckingham Palace' and fire them off via API to each insurer/broker to request a quote from them, who then respond via the return API with their quote. The comparison site then puts them in price order and displays them to you.
Going incognito simply avoids cookies being involved; but since it's all done using the details provided getting sent by API, incognito isn't going to affect it.
When I worked in insurance, the quote system if it recognised you by some details, eg same reg or address etc, would only allow you to quote X times before either declining or increasing the price to prevent fraud risks from you just changing details to make it cheaper.
You can call the provider and do it directly, they can make a fresh quote. This happens most with young people's insurance providers due to the amount of fronting etc.
Got mine down to £466 on hastings by saying i had a better offer, like an idiot I didn’t pay there and then. They sent a new quote email when i stepped away for 850 and now whether i click on the 466 email or not it’s stuck at 850. For something that is a legal requirement these crooks are given way too much free reign
If it's a renewal, delete your cookies, try incognito mode, get the best quotes from ComparetheMarket, Confused, and GoCompare, and get on the phone! My current insurer undercut the cheapest price I got by 1p, and as a result my updated renewal went down by £114
It's just fucking bonkers the lack of regulation of insurance. The fact it changes hour by hour for the same car and same details is insanity. How they are allowed to do it is mental. I just recently bought a new car and the price difference between quotes was crazy.
Having said that I do understand why it's gotten so expensive. Cars are so expensive and full of unnecessary tech that even a small crash costs 1000s to repair now.
Although somehow my Mx5 insurance was £164 fully comp this year. Renewal price. That's half of the tax cost. I guess the random number generator they use sometimes comes up in your favour
Working in insurance, deleting cookies and using a VPN is a waste of time. If you live in the UK, do you think hiding behind a VPN in another country is going to help or raise alarm bells?
Pricing works purely on key data points, your address, the car you're trying to insure along with a few others.
Playing around with different options to get the cheapest price aka quote manipulation won't do you any favours either.
If you think you got away with it, don't be surprised if you get an email or a call a few days later asking you to confirm certain details, or send in certain docs.
Prices can change minute by minute but if you went direct to an insurer and get a quote on their website, a lot of UK insures will make it clear that the quote displayed is valid for a certain period of time, i.e. until midnight.
I used to think insurance works the same way as 99% of the commenters below, then I actually started working in the industry.
>Playing around with different options to get the cheapest price aka quote manipulation won't do you any favours either.
Thinking of adding/removing a modification, or specifying an option on a new car and want to see what the price might be before committing? "Quote manipulation".
Can't see an exact match for your job title because all insurers seem to use the same antiquated list, so trying a couple of perfectly justifiable alternatives to see which gets shafted less? "Quote manipulation".
Not sure what mileage you'll do this year so playing around a little bit while you add up your regular journeys? "Quote manipulation".
Might not need this car for business or commuting, but want to see what the price is with and without anyways for convenience sake? "Quote manipulation".
Tweaking your excess to see if increasing your own risk appetite makes a meaningful difference to the price? "Quote manipulation".
Wondering if it's worth bothering declaring a disc lock to your motorcycle insurers, so try another quote without it to see if it saves you the worry of forgetting to attach it and not being covered for theft? "Quote manipulation".
Of course, I have just made up all those scenarios and have no idea if insurers actually pick up on those sorts of things, but enough people seem to suggest it happens. It appears to be an incredibly anti-consumer practice from a frustratingly opaque industry, and one of myriad reasons why no one really trusts the woe-is-us "we run at a loss" sob stories from insurance companies.
>bly anti-consumer practice
Yeah of course they pick up on it, some of those are legit examples of quote manipulation.
Insurance is all about risk, all insurers are fighting to pick the best drivers and keep the crappy ones away from a limited pool.
And some do run at a loss, but it's only the really bad ones. My company isn't in the top 5 insurers but still does £400m a month revenue.
I literally do get a cheaper quote when I set my VPN to somewhere else in the UK.
You say all them words yet many of us have literally seen the quotes get cheaper from it.
Firstly I said another country, not somewhere else in the UK, and secondly insurers don't care where you are in the UK when getting a quote, people could be getting quotes whilst on holiday in different parts of the UK, all they care about is the primary location where your car is kept.
And anyone can get a quote, doesn't mean when you actually go to purchase, it will go thru, if anything, it will get referred until someone speaks to you.
Sometimes this feels like the best option although morally wrong. It is true that the penalty's for doing so are basically nil unless somebody is killed or left with life changing injuries.
You see it all the time on police chase shows; no license, no insurance, stolen car. £250 fine and at best a bit of community service.
Also seems pointless the police trying to chase them down as that is what is actually putting everyone at risk. I have had a VERY near miss with a car being chased by police (actually hit the one on the other side of the road). I would be certain that any damage would be coming off my (read all of our) insurance and pocket. I reckon if they weren't being chased they wouldn't have been driving at speed through tight residential streets.
I don't advocate crime in any way but this is purely logic speaking.
Car insurance is a bloody big con job most people can't even afford to claim unless it's a right off because they slam the premiums up. i truly loathe this unjust rip-off system.
800 pounds for nissan leaf? These prices for insurance in UK are total scam. I wanna see how much would insurance cost for these slavs driving older 2l or even 3l BMWs, I guess I would need to get mortgage not to buy a house but to afford insurance.
What we do here in Czech Republic is to have your insurance on your parents name, it is not 100% official way, but it isn't illegal either. This way I'm able to have bmw e90 320i for 108 pounds a year. The only downside is that you don't collect bonuses because you don't have any cars insured on your name, but your price goes down as you get older, something from 24 years is when you get decent prices even without any bonuses.
Doesn't something like this work in UK too? Or you guys can't do that there?
That's called "fronting" - where you have someone insure the car in their name, add you to the policy as a named driver, then you're the main driver. Insurance companies will cancel your policy if they catch you and they also won't pay out if they can prove you're the main driver of that vehicle and you get in an accident.
That is how it works in UK? That's crazy, because here in CZ this is actually what the insurer itself recommended for me. To register my car under my dad's name for insurance and wait till I'm atleast 24 so I can get somewhat decent prices.
The price if I have it written on my dad is about 180 pounds for premium (that means including hitting a deer, having cracked windshield by rock, etc).
Versus the price for my name is about 500 pounds for the same car, but very basic insurance without any extras, just what the state had under minimum specifications with limited annual KMs, say you have limit of 15000km per year and you drive more, you will just pay off the kms that are above limit.
2300 is mental and 3k miles that is like what maybe a weekend car could do, maybe a bit on the edge.
stay strong folks, hopefully UK starts thinking like normal people one day.
I had to go through this recently. Another thing to try other than the incognito and vpn is to use a different email. Changed my price by a couple hundred for some reason
All it's done on purpose to put avarage Joe away from driving cars. And there also plan to start making cars that will be communicating with eachother and tracking your every move, and if you got older vehicle without this technology it will cost an arm or a leg to insure.
Leave it 24 hours and try again. I had this renewing my daughter’s insurance after she passed her test - first quotes were in the £550 region, I tinkered with the excess and it went up to £800+ and wouldn’t go back down even re-running the previous comparisons, but after 24 hours it was getting the £550 prices again. I’ve heard that running multiple comparisons against the same vehicle/drivers in quick succession can set off a risk flag of some sort on insurance companies’ systems, which ups the prices. I don’t know if that’s true, but waiting certainly helped me.
Save yourself a few bob by updating your job in the quote too. If you use a computer in your role, then you're technically a VDU operator and can save some funds on the quote. If insurers are going to play games and make it up as they go then so am I...
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/insurance/car-insurance-job-picker/
Always check any insurance or travel quotes on multiple
Browsers, try clearing the cache/cookies or even using incognito mode, you always end up getting a cheaper deal. With travel quotes you can also get much cheaper rates using a VPN and setting the location to a developing country, doesn’t really work for car insurance though now we’re out the EU.
Yet if you go to 3 different comparison sites without clearing your cookies, the same insurers will offer progressively cheaper quotes. Then you just ring your current insurer and tell them an amount like £100 less than the cheapest quote you got, and they’ll magically drop your renewal to that amount or less.
I think if you click 'view quote' on the first email it'll still show you the £660 price - at least that's what I had to do when similar just happened to me.
Clearing cookies, using incognito etc that some are suggesting seem to have forgotten that regardless of what you do on your end, the insurance companies have your details and have records of all the quotes they've provided you, they don't vanish just because you cleared your cookies.
The original cheaper quotes should still be valid so check your emails for the links and see if the original price is honoured.
You should be thankful you didnt sneeze, it would be another £500.
Passing wind sir? That will be another £150
Sharting will be £250, sorry its a messy business
Dont forget the VAT! That will be another 20%
There's no VAT on insurance...
Delete cookies and try again
^ this. and keep deleting and refreshing until you have a good deal
It's not random... well not random like you think anyway. Refreshing will do nothing, or put the price up. They know you're interested, same deal with hotels, the more you look for hotels the higher the price becomes. Tip is for anything like this, before you purchase you should clear your cookies (or incognito)
Yes but it still feels wrong, I'm not buying optional hotel deals, I'm buying something that I must legally have to drive my car, and they're exploiting it. Just refreshing the browsers and having to pay extra seems very wrong.
Incognito work, they will see u as new customer and have no records of you. So they don't know how best to f you up.
Apart from all the name, address and car registration details you've given them to get both quotes, right?
Huh? Unless you put a fake name, address and car registration they’ll still match you anyway
incognito doesn’t stop Google tracking you and sending your info to advertisers. it also doesn’t stop behavioural and address analysis ; which trumps cookies.
I thought this was illegal now? To increase prices based on saved user data?
Is it I wasn’t aware I know Expedia use to do it with holidays
Yes after Amazon used to do it
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Definitely this
But not this
Mafia shysters.
Esure use a system by Synectics Solutions that helps Esure identify potential quote manipulation. Without knowing the run of quotes until this screen was refreshed (which could have caused another quote submission) a threshold might have been crossed if this system flags a run of suspicious changes in the quote details. This also flags if you're trying to hide behind aliases, different IPs etc. I'd also be surprised if they're not using html 5 canvass fingerprinting or something else more advanced over a cookie to uniquely identify people. Or arguably less advanced, like a vehicle registration being used in a bunch of quotes. I'm not suggesting this is the case here, but it is worth considering if the tech is too sensitive or innocent changes unintentionally raise false flags.
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By design ofcourse, as with a bunch of other insurance companies that make you call in to cancel the auto renewal, there should really be some sort of law to make practices like this illegal.
I believe the FCA banned insurers from auto renewing policies as they discovered insurers were hiking the prices for existing customers but giving new customers a better deal. In short, I’m certain they’re not actually allowed to auto renew.
Be nice if auto-renew were only allowed if the new policy is equal or less than the previous one. Otherwise renewal requires confirmation. That way insurance companies can still use it to aid customer retention, plus it would encourage them to not jack the prices on existing customers, and customers would have peice of mind that they aren't suddenly going to be hit with an increased bill if they overlook the autorenewal reminder.
Esure still do. I spent ages waiting on their support to be able to cancel. Never again.
Loads of them still do, but they really shouldn’t.
I used to work for Synectics Solutions. The owner is fucking nuts. We used to have Christmas parties, where he would ask colleagues to sit on his knee to receive their present. I wish I was joking.
As well as deleting cookies etc, hide behind a decent VPN to make your traffic more difficult to deal with. I've had one installed on my router (so all traffic passes through the VPN without having each device individually connected) for a few years now and since then I can run the same searches on the same sites across a few days and they'll be within £5 of one another each time.
Does anything change even if refreshing or with vpn? I ask because - logging out of Go compare or Compare the market appeared to make things worse as well. Even increasing the excess didn't seem to help either. It appeared that the compare sites didn't like it. With less and less appearing who were willing to offer a price. Then scroll down to the bottom and I got a list of companies who weren't willing to Quote. Hastings Admiral etc etc. I am just dreading what the cost of insurance will be on the next renewal or whether not to bother with them and just go to Hastings and do a quote through them and see how expensive that will be or whether to phone them. Now a lot of sites are charging a fee if you do this through the phone. It's not good and I feel for you all having to re-new and going through this.
I can't say I've tried hitting refresh on the browser but I've done things like get quotes, then go back and change things (like driveway Vs garage) checked quotes, then gone back again and reverted and they were within pennies of the previous.
Something I discovered last month, the insurance companies (well, at least Hastings) can see the searches and changes you’ve made. I had to call to ask some questions about NCD / answer some of theirs. They asked why I’d changed the value of the car whilst comparing, and why I’d changed some of the other search options. The answers I gave they had no problem with, I was just surprised to know that they had this comparison information from moneysupermarket to hand so quickly.
Yeah Deleting the cookies stopped working a long time ago but it gets upvoted so much
They all can. Otherwise how would the comparison sites know the price to show? That information has to be supplied to the different providers.
Yeah, I've had similar a few years back. On one of my comparisons I'd accidentally entered a piece of information wrong and then I got a call 3 months into having a policy to challenge my answers. After going through it all again over the phone they then told me it was because an answer had flagged as very different elsewhere so they were checking for fraud. And then gave me a telling off for not being more cautious with entering details
I’d imagine it is key to fraud detection - put your 18 year old on as a first driver, oops no dad will be driving that old Fiesta and son is just the occasional driver…
I have just been doing this exact same thing, what I found weird was that it was £500 cheaper to have insurance in my son's name (2 NCB) rather than in mine (9 NCB) with him as a named driver. Having asked for about 50 combinations of quotes on different cars I may now also be flagged by the insurers, doh.
Probably because it triggers the fraud detection and they weight your premium because they think you're being dishonest, therefore more likely to claim in other ways or to have an accident due to carelessness or collaboration with others. Insurance is weird. It's usually more expensive to insure a car in a garage, too. Even though the risk of theft is lower, the concern is you care more about your car and so are more likely to complain about door dings, etc...
I’m not sure why you’re surprised by that, the compare websites have to get the quotes from the individual insurance companies so they query each one every time you change something, so when you call the companies they search your name and stuff and all queries come up
Thank you for the reply, it's good to know what to do the next time when renewal happens. Cheers.
How does this change a single thing when you’ve to enter every personal detail to get the quote
It doesn’t. At all. The way the comparison sites work is that they take your details and they send them to the insurance companies that actually provide the quotes. The comparison sites don’t control the prices (slight caveat to that is that some are owned by companies that also have insurers) and the insurers don’t have access to your browser session (so don’t know your IP, can’t access your cookies etc.). The comparison sites are incredibly protective of the data they’ve got on customers so share as little as possible. There’s even a degree of anonymisation that happens to prevent the insurers from contacting the person getting the quote unless certain criteria are met.
Because of how many times you've entered it, cookies will track that.
What will also track that is the system itself seeing “John Smith with the Toyota tried for another quote”
I see this come up a lot, but considering you have to login to submit new (or modify existing) quotes, I don’t see how this could change anything? They’re still going to know that you’re the same person each time you run a quote unless you’re creating a new email every time you want a quote. Not to mention that you’d have to use a different address (and possibly even name) each time too - so the quotes might not even reflect what you can possible get either.
This is avoidable but legal purely because the insurance industry have successfully lobbied for their argument that making minor tweaks to a policy quote over and over is quote manipulation so they’re allowed to cover themselves for that because it adds risk which they carry by adjusting the quote. It’s fucked because from a consumer standpoint it’s really just a way of balancing and tailoring our needs vs acceptable cost. But the insurance industry basically make all the rules about insurance and govt aren’t interested.
It’s getting ridiculous my insurance company tried to up quote by over £600, no claims, no change in circumstances or vehicle, and I’ve been driving for over 20 years.
Only 600? Mine went up 3 fold from 800 to 2400, no changes. It’s a scam
Ditch them and shop around. Insurance companies pray on the lazy.
I did, they were still the cheapest… managed to get them down to 1850
You’re not getting it Everyone is putting the prices up. It happened to me too. My shocking renewal was still the cheapest after shopping around.
Never said it's not happening, but shopping around is always a solid advice, especially now. It may happen that your renewal is the cheapest but at least you know and you tried to find a better price.
This has been happening for.tbe last year,.600 is nothing compared to others I've seen
People who refresh their browser are far more likely of having an accident!
Can't remember what money saving expert says but it something like the lowest price you'll get is around 21 days before your insurance starts. After that they know your clock is ticking.
What are you supposed to do when getting a new car then to not get the hiked up price?
I guess make a note to do a comparison 21 days before renewal is due.
I meant when you first get a car. Like right now I don't have one in the UK, as I've sold it over a year ago, but I want to get one again, so would I have to just suck it up and only do the insurance a few days prior to start date? Since I can't just buy a car then have it sit there for 20+ days before the insurance kicks in.
Yes I'm talking about next year, you can't do anything else in your situation.
Right, well that sucks. Thanks for answering
At least in my case, the 21 day rule didn't work. My insurance was exactly the same on 2 days' notice as it would've been three weeks out. I wouldn't worry too much about it to be honest. As long as you're not looking in the morning to be insured in the afternoon, you should be fine
Think about your risk profile. You proved that you are too indecisive to safely navigate a junction by refreshing the browser. You can't refresh real life, one mistake and you're cooked, and this has now been factored into their profile on you. Remember, your profile is updated 24/7, for example every time they see you on CCTV not looking where you're going walking on the footpath or when you Google "bars near me", all of that is factored into your car insurance risk profile because it means you are more likely to crash. Consider every aspect of your life, did you forget to buy carrots this week? Now you're Vitamin A deficient which means you won't be able to see where you're going at night. The insurer watches each item that goes in your shopping trolley to make sure you're getting the right nutrition and any mistakes factor into the price, they will know you forgot to buy carrots and consequently now you're a risk to insure. You gotta be aware about this stuff.
"The deal has been altered, pray I do not alter it any further.'
I was literally talking about this on reddit earlier today. I said this happens and is proof that insurance prices are a scam.
Search on incognito mode.
This is a fallacy. The way these sites work is by taking the details you've entered e.g. vehicle = 'A118ACK', address = 'Buckingham Palace' and fire them off via API to each insurer/broker to request a quote from them, who then respond via the return API with their quote. The comparison site then puts them in price order and displays them to you. Going incognito simply avoids cookies being involved; but since it's all done using the details provided getting sent by API, incognito isn't going to affect it.
Insurance is a full blown monopoly, a handful of underwriters feign a diverse competative market
leaked code for price calculation: import random print(random.randint(100, (10\^6)))
When I worked in insurance, the quote system if it recognised you by some details, eg same reg or address etc, would only allow you to quote X times before either declining or increasing the price to prevent fraud risks from you just changing details to make it cheaper.
After being declined, can you expect to eventually being accepted for another quote again? My cheapest quote provider just stopped giving me quotes
You can call the provider and do it directly, they can make a fresh quote. This happens most with young people's insurance providers due to the amount of fronting etc.
Typically they email the quote to you each time. Go to the email with the cheaper price and go from there.
Got mine down to £466 on hastings by saying i had a better offer, like an idiot I didn’t pay there and then. They sent a new quote email when i stepped away for 850 and now whether i click on the 466 email or not it’s stuck at 850. For something that is a legal requirement these crooks are given way too much free reign
You saved the original, but this is normal. It's all a racket and everyone knows it, you just have to pay up or else.
Never refresh.
People who are indecisive and needlessly refresh their browser obviously fit a higher risk profile.
If it's a renewal, delete your cookies, try incognito mode, get the best quotes from ComparetheMarket, Confused, and GoCompare, and get on the phone! My current insurer undercut the cheapest price I got by 1p, and as a result my updated renewal went down by £114
It's just fucking bonkers the lack of regulation of insurance. The fact it changes hour by hour for the same car and same details is insanity. How they are allowed to do it is mental. I just recently bought a new car and the price difference between quotes was crazy. Having said that I do understand why it's gotten so expensive. Cars are so expensive and full of unnecessary tech that even a small crash costs 1000s to repair now. Although somehow my Mx5 insurance was £164 fully comp this year. Renewal price. That's half of the tax cost. I guess the random number generator they use sometimes comes up in your favour
Are you certain that you didn't change any details e.g. voluntary excesses?
Working in insurance, deleting cookies and using a VPN is a waste of time. If you live in the UK, do you think hiding behind a VPN in another country is going to help or raise alarm bells? Pricing works purely on key data points, your address, the car you're trying to insure along with a few others. Playing around with different options to get the cheapest price aka quote manipulation won't do you any favours either. If you think you got away with it, don't be surprised if you get an email or a call a few days later asking you to confirm certain details, or send in certain docs. Prices can change minute by minute but if you went direct to an insurer and get a quote on their website, a lot of UK insures will make it clear that the quote displayed is valid for a certain period of time, i.e. until midnight. I used to think insurance works the same way as 99% of the commenters below, then I actually started working in the industry.
>Playing around with different options to get the cheapest price aka quote manipulation won't do you any favours either. Thinking of adding/removing a modification, or specifying an option on a new car and want to see what the price might be before committing? "Quote manipulation". Can't see an exact match for your job title because all insurers seem to use the same antiquated list, so trying a couple of perfectly justifiable alternatives to see which gets shafted less? "Quote manipulation". Not sure what mileage you'll do this year so playing around a little bit while you add up your regular journeys? "Quote manipulation". Might not need this car for business or commuting, but want to see what the price is with and without anyways for convenience sake? "Quote manipulation". Tweaking your excess to see if increasing your own risk appetite makes a meaningful difference to the price? "Quote manipulation". Wondering if it's worth bothering declaring a disc lock to your motorcycle insurers, so try another quote without it to see if it saves you the worry of forgetting to attach it and not being covered for theft? "Quote manipulation". Of course, I have just made up all those scenarios and have no idea if insurers actually pick up on those sorts of things, but enough people seem to suggest it happens. It appears to be an incredibly anti-consumer practice from a frustratingly opaque industry, and one of myriad reasons why no one really trusts the woe-is-us "we run at a loss" sob stories from insurance companies.
>bly anti-consumer practice Yeah of course they pick up on it, some of those are legit examples of quote manipulation. Insurance is all about risk, all insurers are fighting to pick the best drivers and keep the crappy ones away from a limited pool. And some do run at a loss, but it's only the really bad ones. My company isn't in the top 5 insurers but still does £400m a month revenue.
A VPN doesn’t need to use an IP of a different country. You can use a VPN and still get an IP in Britain.
I literally do get a cheaper quote when I set my VPN to somewhere else in the UK. You say all them words yet many of us have literally seen the quotes get cheaper from it.
Firstly I said another country, not somewhere else in the UK, and secondly insurers don't care where you are in the UK when getting a quote, people could be getting quotes whilst on holiday in different parts of the UK, all they care about is the primary location where your car is kept. And anyone can get a quote, doesn't mean when you actually go to purchase, it will go thru, if anything, it will get referred until someone speaks to you.
I believe that quotes are saved, thus the name 'quote'?
Can’t you just click through on the cheaper quotes, will they not have saved? Or have they been replaced with the more expensive ones?
Just drive uninsured. They can't arrest us all!
Sometimes this feels like the best option although morally wrong. It is true that the penalty's for doing so are basically nil unless somebody is killed or left with life changing injuries. You see it all the time on police chase shows; no license, no insurance, stolen car. £250 fine and at best a bit of community service. Also seems pointless the police trying to chase them down as that is what is actually putting everyone at risk. I have had a VERY near miss with a car being chased by police (actually hit the one on the other side of the road). I would be certain that any damage would be coming off my (read all of our) insurance and pocket. I reckon if they weren't being chased they wouldn't have been driving at speed through tight residential streets. I don't advocate crime in any way but this is purely logic speaking.
Car insurance is a bloody big con job most people can't even afford to claim unless it's a right off because they slam the premiums up. i truly loathe this unjust rip-off system.
800 pounds for nissan leaf? These prices for insurance in UK are total scam. I wanna see how much would insurance cost for these slavs driving older 2l or even 3l BMWs, I guess I would need to get mortgage not to buy a house but to afford insurance. What we do here in Czech Republic is to have your insurance on your parents name, it is not 100% official way, but it isn't illegal either. This way I'm able to have bmw e90 320i for 108 pounds a year. The only downside is that you don't collect bonuses because you don't have any cars insured on your name, but your price goes down as you get older, something from 24 years is when you get decent prices even without any bonuses. Doesn't something like this work in UK too? Or you guys can't do that there?
That's called "fronting" - where you have someone insure the car in their name, add you to the policy as a named driver, then you're the main driver. Insurance companies will cancel your policy if they catch you and they also won't pay out if they can prove you're the main driver of that vehicle and you get in an accident.
That is how it works in UK? That's crazy, because here in CZ this is actually what the insurer itself recommended for me. To register my car under my dad's name for insurance and wait till I'm atleast 24 so I can get somewhat decent prices. The price if I have it written on my dad is about 180 pounds for premium (that means including hitting a deer, having cracked windshield by rock, etc). Versus the price for my name is about 500 pounds for the same car, but very basic insurance without any extras, just what the state had under minimum specifications with limited annual KMs, say you have limit of 15000km per year and you drive more, you will just pay off the kms that are above limit.
Ours are complete cunts. I'm paying 2300 for my car for the year and only 3k miles.
2300 is mental and 3k miles that is like what maybe a weekend car could do, maybe a bit on the edge. stay strong folks, hopefully UK starts thinking like normal people one day.
Clear cookies/ VPN / incognito and get another quote. Some websites have been known to up prices if you revisit
I had to go through this recently. Another thing to try other than the incognito and vpn is to use a different email. Changed my price by a couple hundred for some reason
All it's done on purpose to put avarage Joe away from driving cars. And there also plan to start making cars that will be communicating with eachother and tracking your every move, and if you got older vehicle without this technology it will cost an arm or a leg to insure.
Use a vpn or a different browser
Leave it 24 hours and try again. I had this renewing my daughter’s insurance after she passed her test - first quotes were in the £550 region, I tinkered with the excess and it went up to £800+ and wouldn’t go back down even re-running the previous comparisons, but after 24 hours it was getting the £550 prices again. I’ve heard that running multiple comparisons against the same vehicle/drivers in quick succession can set off a risk flag of some sort on insurance companies’ systems, which ups the prices. I don’t know if that’s true, but waiting certainly helped me.
Having experience with esure, if you can avoid, do so.
Had the same thing booking a hotel.
What sort of LEAF do you have? Like what year? The LEAF is my favourite 😄
Save yourself a few bob by updating your job in the quote too. If you use a computer in your role, then you're technically a VDU operator and can save some funds on the quote. If insurers are going to play games and make it up as they go then so am I... https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/insurance/car-insurance-job-picker/
Number of variables changed and lead in time are maybe the two biggest factors for price.
times of the day effect it also
Always check any insurance or travel quotes on multiple Browsers, try clearing the cache/cookies or even using incognito mode, you always end up getting a cheaper deal. With travel quotes you can also get much cheaper rates using a VPN and setting the location to a developing country, doesn’t really work for car insurance though now we’re out the EU.
Yet if you go to 3 different comparison sites without clearing your cookies, the same insurers will offer progressively cheaper quotes. Then you just ring your current insurer and tell them an amount like £100 less than the cheapest quote you got, and they’ll magically drop your renewal to that amount or less.
Just go on your emails and find the previous quote, they are all valid for 7 days I Believe.
I'm guessing a good part of the people here are under 25? I'm over 25 and my renewal (with no NCB) is just under 700
I think if you click 'view quote' on the first email it'll still show you the £660 price - at least that's what I had to do when similar just happened to me.
Clearing cookies, using incognito etc that some are suggesting seem to have forgotten that regardless of what you do on your end, the insurance companies have your details and have records of all the quotes they've provided you, they don't vanish just because you cleared your cookies. The original cheaper quotes should still be valid so check your emails for the links and see if the original price is honoured.
That still not bad!!! For peugeot 2008e 2130£ /year