Posts tagged go compare
The trouble with aggregators…
Aug 27th
If you have anything slightly unusual is that they can be completely unhelpful. Seeing that GoCompare had added a few specialists to their panel, like A-Plan, Express and Sureterm, I though I’d run through a quote on a lightly modified Nissan Silvia, to see what their prices were like.
Unfortunately, although it happily lets you fill in all your details, it then brings up the supremely unhelpful list below. None of their panel, specialists included, could quote it. Nice one GoCompare!
It just goes to show that if you want a quote on something even a little bit out of the ordinary, you are currently still best off leaving the aggregators for Mondeo man and giving a genuine specialist broker a call. (Our number is 08000 83 88 33)
—UPDATE 16/10 —
I think some people thought I was having a pop at either GoCompare or the specialists currently on their panel. My point was really that the aggregator model, whilst very useful in many circumstances is not any help in the many cases where there is anything even slightly unusual.
I have recommended elsewhere on this blog that customers should always try to include a mixture of aggregators, direct writers and brokers when they are shopping around – If you have a classic, modified, imported or kit car, or if you are a younger driver, have convictions, female or mature, brokers can ask the questions that aggregators can’t or don’t – and that even includes the ones I listed.
FSA Criticises Car Insurance Comparison Sites
May 12th
Insurance comparison sites are springing up at a rapid rate, as new entrants emerge onto the market every day to give confused.com, moneysupermarket and gocompare a run for their money.
But how valuable are comparison sites?
I’ve previously looked at sources of bias, and lack of market coverage, but this week the FSA came back with their assessment of the state of the market, and in particular how it affects customers.
It’s the specific examples of bad (and good) practice that are interesting, as the problems will resonate with anyone who has spent much time on the different aggregator sites.
Here are some of their findings of bad practice by car insurance comparison sites:
Some sites have…
“Notification that assumptions have been used to generate quotes, but no indication of what those assumptions are.”
Helpful if you click through only to find out you are not eligible for that particular quote because of that SP30 you picked up 2 years ago.
“Using price as the sole basis for “comparison”, but not advising consumers that they should consider other factors, and that the difference in price is likely to reflect the different levels of protection offered by the policies.”
This is pretty major. Anyone can put a policy together that’s cheap, as long as they leave out most of the features that normal people might actually want. Even Swiftcover, who compete as aggresively on price as anyone, know that, as demonstrated by their own news release on unwitting assumptions made by drivers on levels of cover.
“Not listing all benefits provided by the policy, and not providing information on the basis for listing the benefits nor advising consumers that policies may have other benefits not listed.”
Not listing all the benefits makes it very hard to do a truly fair comparison without ringing the insurance companies concerned, which would kind of defeat the point of the aggregator site. Imagine if you had two quotes around £10 difference in price. What the FSA are saying here is that the second place quote could have free breakdown, legal and accident cover, but you would never even know.
“Not making it clear that the policies listed did not all contain the provisions or benefits specifically requested by the consumer.”
Can you believe this. You’ve asked the comparison site specifically for quotes with protected no claims bonus, and then the site ignores you and returns policies with and without the feature you’d asked for. And this actually happens. It’s easy to see some very tricky situations developing here in the event of a claim.
“Providing a figure for the “total excess”, when in fact this is only the voluntary excess and a further compulsory excess will need to be applied. In one case, a further compulsory excess of £320 was applicable. The compulsory excess figures quoted on the site were provided as the actual level of excess to be applied, but were shown to be incorrect when compared to the broker’s or insurer’s website. In one case a figure of £100 was given for the compulsory excess, but in fact the actual compulsory excess applicable was £475.”
Ouch! This may just be poor programming, but it comes across as dishonest. By the time you would find out about this you are probably well into the ‘winning’ quote’s site, and would probably be dubious about checking the other results in case the same happened again.
“The quote given on the comparison site differs from the quote given on the brokers or insurers website, but no information has been changed and no additional questions asked to warrant a change in price.”
This is the one that most people notice, and possibly stems from a different set of assumptions (but why?). Again it comes across as being something like a con if the price has ‘revised’ upwards.
“The information provided by the consumer to the comparison site is incorrectly passed to the broker or insurer.”
The whole point of comparison sites is that ‘You only have to enter your information once’ so this just seems shoddy.
“Figures given for the cost of optional extras are incorrect. In the majority of cases seen where the cost was incorrect, the comparison site underestimated the cost of the optional extras.”
Why? Are they just guessing, or do they not think anyone cares about the price of car insurance optional extras?
“The quote given by the comparison site excludes certain features (for example legal assistance and breakdown cover), but these features are then automatically added to the final quote price when proceeding through to payment on the broker’s or insurer’s website.”
I think we have to let the comparison sites off this one, to be fair. The fault here is the broker or insurer applying the old thetrainline.com tactic of whacking on all the optional extras by default, which is annoying, but hardly the aggregator’s fault.
So what can you do about this?
Well as the FSA have decided, in their wisdom, not to ‘name and shame’ the aggregator sites which are getting away with these poor quality features, it’s down to you as the customer to keep an eye out and beware of misleading information. Saying that, it is true that insurance comparison sites perform an important service, and help you narrow down some of the thousands of options and get a ballpark figure for your quote. Saying that, I would also recommend that everybody should ring a couple of direct insurers, and at least one specialist insurance broker (like us for example – if you need a quote, call us on 08000 83 88 33).
There are many companies that still don’t appear on comparison websites, despite the misleading claims (according to the FSA) of almost total market coverage by some of the aggregators.
What’s more, specialist brokers may well have a specialist scheme that fits your situation, and here at Adrian Flux we have over 200 such schemes with 40+ insurers on our panel, so you may well be special without realising it, and that could save you lots of money. The third reason you should consider a broker, is that the broker can take many more factors into account than any comparison site, and more importantly, we only need to ask the questions that are relevant to your situation. Some of this can only be done over the phone, when we can talk to you direct and treat you as an individual.
In any case, if the FSA is to be believed, you need to be careful before accepting comparison sites at face value.
Kwik-Fit Insurance join GoCompare in Google Hell
Feb 29th
Kwik-Fit Insurance have picked up a penalty from Google, probably for using the same blog spamming techniques that got GoCompare banned from the search engine.
A search for “kwik fit insurance” currently brings up only the web page of the tyres and parts business, wheras the car insurance site has plummeted 50-odd places. Whilst this probably won’t have had the same devastating impact as on GoCompare, they will certainly be feeling the effects of the missing traffic.
Paying for an advertising link is one thing, but would Kwik Fit be paying for links from sites ostensibly about Crime Scenes or web hosting if any benefit other than a link for the links sake were in their mind. It’s great news for everyone who can’t afford to subvert the structure of the internet in this way, as a sign that Google is making good on its claim to put quality sites to the fore and penalise spammers.
Gocompare car insurance search ban
Feb 14th
I’m not usually given to gloating at others downfall, but the recent Google penalty for GoCompare, probably for paid blog post spamming and massive scale paid link buying. Hitwise estimates that they have lost around 87% of their traffic from the coveted ‘car insurance’ terms – but currently they are not even appearing in results for their own name (apart from paid adverts).
The real message Google is sending out through this slap on the wrist for Gocompare, and a similar one they handed out to MoneySupermarket last year, is that companies buying their way to the top of the Google listings aren’t going to have such an easy ride anymore.
I wonder how much money Gocompare have spent on this link building? Presumably they haven’t yet spent all of the £30 million that esure bunged the ‘independent comparison site’ for marketing.
Sorry if this post is a bit of a minority interest for regular readers, but bear in mind next time you type car insurance into Google how the results may well be skewed towards companies with the largest online marketing budgets.
Who owns your insurer?
Aug 8th
Direct Line vs Confused part 5.
One of the complaints that Direct Line made about the aggregators was about the ownership of the comparison sites, suggesting, I suppose, that perhaps the price comparison sites might be biased in favour of their owners.
What many people don’t realise is that many of the competing brands of insurance advertising on your TV screens every day are all owned by a relatively few companies, and very little mention is made of the links between them.
Direct Line have been very quick to point out the following ownership issues with the aggregators, but after reading the whole of this post, you might decide that they have been lobbing stones from their own glass dwelling.
Confused.com owned by Admiral. Yes, that Admiral. They also own elephant.co.uk, Bell Direct and Diamond, the womens car insurance specialist.
GoCompare are “independent” but have received a £30m loan from esure. If they can’t pay esure back in cash, esure become a major shareholder. That’s according to the Insurance Times.
Compare the Market is owned by Budget. This one is a bit naughty, as all of the brands quoted are Budget group companies – but they don’t make that obvious – they also own Dial Direct, “Local Broker“, ibuyeco, Quote Mart, and Junction who run the insurance arms of the Post Office, Marks and Spencer, Debenhams, Bradford & Bingley, Homebase and yesinsurance.com.
MoneySupermarket have just floated (in what was described as an “unfortunate” stock market debut, they failed to raise as much cash as had been hoped for, partly due to a recent Google penalty for link spamming which saw their web traffic shrink alarmingly!). As such they are independent.
So much for the main price comparison sites, what about some of the other big insurance brands?
HBOS Group owns Halifax Insurance, esure, Sheilas Wheels and First Alternative.
Royal & SunAlliance owns More Than
GroupAMA owns Carole Nash, Choice Quote, Bollington & Lark
AXA owns Swiftcover and has a share in Venture Preference. It also offers quotes as Lloyds TSB Insurance and insurance.co.uk
AON owns Firebond & Footman James
MMA owns Swinton, its4me & bullseye
Zurich owns Endsleigh
Fortis owns RIAS
Kwik-Fit Insurance Services owns Express Insurance
BDML Connect owns Lancaster
Fresh Insurance owns Ladybird and First Insurance
IAG owns Hastings Direct, People’s Choice, Diamond, Advantage, Open & Direct and Equity
There are loads more like this, but finally we come to
RBS Group – the Royal Bank of Scotland Group includes our old friends Direct Line, plus Churchill, Privilege, NIG as well as insurance sold branded as Tesco Insurance, Natwest, Virgin Money, MBNA, BMW Insurance, MINI Insurance, Mint, Egg, Nationwide, Age Concern, Vauxhall Insurance and several others!
Of course, I’m sure none of those brand affinity deals count as middle men, at least to Direct Line’s way of thinking. And I’m sure Direct Line think that everyone must know that they are part of a larger insurance group, otherwise they wouldn’t have made such a big fuss over the ownership of the price comparison sites. And I’m sure that none of the RBS Group would ever use a price comparison site, much less run one, given the arguments put forward so forcefully by Direct Line.
That must be another company starting up tescocompare.com, then, registering the domain name and taking out a trademark. And it must be a different
RBS Insurance, whose brands include Direct Line and Churchill, is understood to have invested millions of pounds in the venture.
All this makes me very grateful to work for a family owned specialist car insurance company – my life would be very confusing if I had to reconcile multiple sets of brand values that were pulling in different and mutually contradictory directions!
But for the customer – beware and make sure that when you ring round you are actually getting quotes from more than one company. And if you call us on 08000 838 833, we’ll impartially check our panel of over 40.
Update 21/09: Well what do you know! Tesco Compare has launched with a whole load of RBS Group brands offering quote comparisons “that you can’t get anywhere else” (although no Direct Line, of course) along with a large quota of HBOS companies.
Update 04/09/2008 – brands moved, bought etc. since last time I checked have now been added.
Direct Line vs. Confused.com
Aug 6th
There’s been a lot in the papers about the spat started by Direct Line, whose wheeled telephones (more of those in another post) have been gracing our screens for many years. As you may have seen, their recent commercials have pulled no punches in exposing perceived shortcomings with the price comparison “aggregator” sites, like confused.com, gocompare and insurancesupermarket.
They’ve suggested that the comparison sites are too focused on price and take no account of added features, such as courtesy cars, or the weird and wonderful extras that Direct Line attach to their policies, whether you want them or not.
This has sparked a full on barney between Direct Line and the aggregators.
First, Direct Line’s blanket TV ads accused Confused, Money Supermarket, Go Compare et al of numerous alleged offences:
- deceiving the public by not being open about how they were funded.
- providing cheap quotes which go up when you try to take out cover.
- not offering extras and add-ons.
- not being honest about who owns them.
- that many people did not realise that not all insurers appeared on the price comaprison sites.
So then the comparators struck back, pointing out Direct Line’s own shortcomings. But Direct Line were on a roll and promptly produced new research claiming they were the cheapest insurer. This research came across as a little suspect from the off, as DL were defined as the cheapest “major insurance provider” on the basis that they “were amongst the three cheapest providers” 257 times out of 1000 quotes.
So MoneySupermarket released figures that showed that in many cases Direct Line wouldn’t even get into the top 10 quotes on their site, and suggested this was the reason that Direct Line hated comparison sites.
In all of this, brokers like us seem to have been ignored, although our record levels of business so far this year would suggest that there is plenty of opportunity for the old sort of “middle man”.
So let’s have a look at this in a bit more detail. Over a few posts I’ll be asking some pertinent questions.
- What about the points raised in this spat between Direct Line and the aggregators?
- And who should you choose, a direct writer, comparison website or broker?
Some of the answers may be surprising!