Search the Community

I got my car insurance renewal through today; it was well above what I 'm paying now - no shock really as it's what they do every year. So I went online and checked for deals on two well-known sites which shall remain nameless, except to say that one features a fat Italian sounding twat with a daft wavy moustache and the other exotic wee beasts with Russian accents. To my delight, I found on the first site that the lowest quote was well below my renewal price. However, when I went through the whole form-filling process, including my debit card details, and pressed "Purchase Now", it came up with some jive about that quote not being available, and to "ring this number to resolve and see if we can improve on this great quote". So, like a muppet I did, and after 16 minutes of being "....held in a queue, and your call is important to us", the operator, clearly acting on standard advice, said "oh, that quote isn't coming up on my screen, but I can do it for X" ( £168 more than the on screen quote from these people). I asked him for his email address, which he volunteered, so I sent him the quote; somebody from the company rang me back but wasn't prepared to honour what their quote said, and said he couldn't explain how it had happened. Just one of those things? Grumpy BJ having a typical whinge? Nope, the exact same thing happened when I tried the other site, except this 'new' quote was £185 more than their online quote! Oh, and it also happened a few weeks ago when I tried to sort out my mum's car insurance. So the scam cunning plan is: you spend over an hour using more than one comparison site and they pretend to be experiencing an online processing hiccup, and get you to ring them. You do so in all good faith and they try to mug you. No better than car-jackers in my opinion. Surely something can be done about this; worth a complaint to the FSA maybe?