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Price comparison websites have their limitations

A little inside knowledge can go a long way to help you keep you insurance premiums down when hunting for the best price using a price comparison site. Here are just a few tips to make sure you get the best possible quote.

Sponsored links

Although none of the sites used sponsored links for insurance, the same cannot be said of the other products they offer. It’s important to be aware that while the sites may be showing you the genuinely cheapest insurance deal from their pool of insurers, the companies at the top of the credit card or savings tables may have paid to be there. 

If you do a credit card search on Confused, for example, it is not immediately obvious that the products that come up are sponsored. You have to scroll to the bottom to read the disclaimer which says ‘there are other cards which may be more suitable for you’, and then click on the ‘view more’ button. Similarly, on GoCompare, if you click on its savings or credit card links it takes you to personal finance website Lovemoney.co.uk, where all the credit cards and savings accounts are sponsored, but you’d have to read the small print to know that.

Beware default answers

Several of the websites we tried were overly reliant on using default answers when you were filling in their forms. If a question has a default answer pre-filled in, it makes it easier to miss a question without realising it and therefore potentially give a wrong answer to a question you didn’t even realise you had been asked.

And the default answers aren’t necessarily the ones you’d expect to be the most common. Moneysupermarket, for example defaults to ‘your house is occupied during the day’ on its home insurance form when, for many people who work, the house is empty all day.

Comparethemarket and Uswitch, on the other hand, use very few pre-filled answers, meaning that if you miss a question you cannot proceed to the next step until you have answered it.

Voluntary excess

One of the key ways of bringing your premiums down is to increase your voluntary excess – the amount of any claim you have to pay yourself on top of the insurer’s compulsory excess.

Several of the comparison sites set quite a high default voluntary excess – Moneysupermarket defaults to £500 for car and £250 for home insurance, and Confused.com defaults to £250 for car and £100 for home.

Failing to spot this default option could result in cheaper premiums, but a higher excess than you want. Having a car worth £600, for example, and ending up with a £500 excess, makes insurance almost worthless but you still have to have it. Ideally, sites would leave the voluntary excess blank for you to fill in.

Any voluntary excess will be in addition to the insurer’s compulsory excess, but it is not always clear on the results page how much each of these will be. Certain sites such as Moneysupermarket, Gocompare and Uswitch separate out the voluntary and compulsory excesses on the results page for car insurance, allowing you to see exactly how the total is broken down. Others, however, just show a total figure, often leaving the user unclear whether it is the voluntary or compulsory excess, or both.