The price is not necessarily right!

A recent independent study of the top five insurance comparison sites has found that Confused.com is the site that is most likely to give customers an accurate quote for car insurance.

The study found that after checking over 2,300 prices across the top five insurance aggregators, Confused.com returned an accurate quote more often than the rest. In fact, Confused.com returned an accurate quote 96% of the time compared with 93% of the time for Gocompare and just 72% of the time for Moneysupermarket.

The research revealed that some sites make far too many assumptions about the customer in order to have a shorter application form and return the cheapest quote. But this does little to help the customer as either the final price could be considerably higher than the initial quote ‘promised' by the comparison site, or there is a real possibility of being underinsured.

The main assumption that can make a quote look much cheaper is the voluntary excess. The higher this is, the cheaper the quote, so some sites will increase the assumed excess to £500 or £600. Whilst for younger drivers this is acceptable, for those who have built up some no claims bonus, they are generally looking to have a far lower voluntary excess of around £250.

For example, the kind of assumptions that some comparison sites make about drivers in order to display cheap car quotes include:

Voluntary excess set automatically to £500
No modifications
No secondary occupation
No children

As a result, customers could be shocked to find their final quote is considerably higher than their original quote after correcting the above assumptions to match their actual circumstances. Or customers may not even realise the assumptions have been made about them and end up with an insurance policy which isn't the best one for them.

John Poole, Research Director at Research and Marketing plus - the company behind the research -says "Confused.com came out top in terms of accuracy. We tested over 2,300 prices across five different comparison sites, so it was a significant study. People need to be aware that some other sites make a number of assumptions which can mean the price they see is not the price they get, but with Confused.com, in nearly all cases, it is."

Confused.com's application form makes far fewer assumptions and allows customers to do such things as choose their desired amount of voluntary excess - the kind of features that give Confused.com market-leading quote accuracy.

Carlton Hood, CEO of Confused.com comments, "We are looking out for the consumer by providing quotes that offer the right policy for the right price - that is why over 50% of the traffic to our site is repeat business; our customers know where they stand."