Sometimes it is better to do it yourself... (AA Car Insurance)

Member Name: tomjw

Product:	AA Car Insurance
Date:	12/07/02 (296 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Saves a little bit of time., A useful service if used with caution.

Disadvantages: Doesn't necessarily find the lowest quote., You could end up paying over the odds.

I have recently turned the ever-so-important, and expensive, age of 17, which meant that I wanted to be insured to drive my mother's car, a P-registration Ford Fiesta. She had previously been insured through the AA, so naturally we contacted them for a quote. After all, we wouldn't want to waste our time doing it ourselves, and the AA finds you the cheapest quote, right? Wrong.
The *cheapest* quote that they could obtain was some £700 more than my mum's previous insurance premium (about £250). This was rather shocking, as whilst we knew that young drivers were expensive to insure, we thought that this seemed a little excessive. We knew several friends who were insured on similar vehicles for lesser amounts, so we decided to conduct a quick comparison. Out came the trusty Yellow Pages, and we started to shop around.

The results were quite astounding. Of the first three companies we tried, all gave lower quotes than the AA. And I'm not talking just pounds, but hundreds of pounds. In the end we chose Frizzell which gave us a quote of about £460 - under half the price of the AA's cheapest offering.

My mother was astounded by this, so she called back the AA and they said that they use a list of specific insurers and the £950 quote they found was indeed the lowest of the lot.

In conclusion, don't believe everything the TV advert tells you, especially if you have a young driver or a provisional licence holder to insure.

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