Renewing car insurance, Tesco Bank, a rare happy ending

[merry]

You know how when your car renewal comes up and you find they're going to auto-renew in a week and have outrageously increased the premium?

And you have to decide whether to Pay Up, ring up and complain (usually gets you a discount on the spot) or tediously go through all the comparison sites?

We have three cars to insure and the last one I did the comparison thing for, the saving was only £17 so it just wasn't worth changing; so when Juliet's Mini came up for renewal this month I was tempted just to let it auto-renew....

Until I saw they had increased the premium from £260 to £378!!!

There was nothing for it but to buckle down and get onto the comparison sites .. with dread in my heart and two cups of tea.

Current insurer (Admiral) dropped that £378 to £344 when we persisted with 'we want to cancel'. Not good enough.

Direct Line wanted £260 despite their insuring JYM's car and house too.

Quidco/MSE comparison site came up with 44 quotes... lowest of which at £192 was Swinton Essentials, which we hadn't heard of. Fourth in the list we spotted dear old Mr Tesco, who offered £212 inc windscreen repair and courtesy car.

THEN when we went to check out, they asked 'do you have a Tesco clubcard?' which we do, and dropped the price on the spot to £172



Saved £200 on the original auto-renew price from Admiral, got clubcard points for using Tesco credit card for payment, AND should get £25 or so for going through Quidco.

What a faff though. But that's quite a saving. Might change Snowball and Fizzy over to Tesco too if it's similarly well-priced.

[eccles]

And Tesco delivered all your groceries too!

The Direct Line adverts claim that they're not on the price comparison websites don't they. There's a reason for that...

[Furby]

I don't know about car renewals as I have avoided that by having other problems such as getting buses and trams and being fined for failing the tram puzzles properly. There are so few happy endings in anything now I am glad merry managed to get one of them.

There is a wider problem that nobody in any power seems to accept and try to deal with. It shouldn't be the case that we run the world on a brand new customers only basis and rip off existing established customers. It's unfair but must also cost the companies so much more in admin than just keeping a stable customer already credit checked and proved they pay bills on time.

I don't know what an answer might be though as it has been tried with energy bills hasn't it price cap for existing customers and busineses went bust because they couldn't get money from those customers any more which isnt a happy ending either.

[eccles]

Furby is right. One thing that should be legislated against is the practice of energy companies to not offer switch deals to existing customers. To get a switch deal from comparison sites you have to enter your current energy company. That company is then automatically excluded from the comparison site's list. It's a no-brainer for the government to stop this.