I have nothing but good things to say about Classicline (brokers) and GB (underwriters).
Thanks for the lead.
My insurance journey:-
Several years ago I was with Less Th>n and after many frustrating conversations with India, the inconvenience of having to extend my policy every time I wanted to take the car out of the country, and their inability to simply post documents to me I decided I had had enough of the 'Ryanair' model of insurance and would find a good broker again.
I switched to
http://www.stuartcollins.com and was very happy with them for several years. I have nothing but praise for them: they answer the phone promptly, you speak to a knowledgable helpful human being and their prices were no worse than the internet cut-price providers. I thought I had found my broker and wouldn't be changing again. Unfortunately they were frightened by the name Maserati and although were willing to insure it, openly admitted they wouldn't be competitive.
With my policy up for renewal this week I decided to put some serious work into it. The criteria are QP, worth about £20k, limited mileage 5,000, myself and partner insured, Central London, garaged, fully comp, full NCB, no claims nor convictions, no other cars in the household but both of us have motorbikes (some brokers take this into consideration, some don't).
Gocompare.com returned the cheapest,
£600 with Privilege.com but with a staggering £850 Excess, protected NCB but NO foreign use.
Stuart Collins wanted
£1,100 but I got them down to
£936, however the Excess was also a mountainous £850.
Comparethemarket.com couldn't get near gocompare's prices. All were coming in with ±£850 Excesses.
From Googling around on the subject I came to the conclusion Protected NCB is a scam. On some of the quotes I ran it was making as much as £100 difference to the premium and all the examples I found on the Net showed people's premiums still shot up after a claim regardless of having protection or not. When I think of all those £100s I've spent on it over the years.......argh.
Wanting to check what the Privilege quote would be without the Protected NCB I discovered something interesting about the quoting game. I went back into my £600 quote with gocompare and removed Protected NCB but the premium surprisingly went UP (to £660), I then added it back in and it went up again (to £722). I went back to the £600 quote and pretended to buy it which took me to Privilege's web site, I followed the screens through and before clicking "buy" I removed the Protection and the premium went down to £540.
What I learnt here is the comparison web sites are using the time remaining to renewal to evaluate their offer. They know as you have fewer days remaining you are more likely to be pushed into accepting a higher premium. The original £600 quote (£540 without NCB Protection) was done almost a month before renewal. The change I made was with a week remaining. The lesson is: start you comparisons as EARLY AS POSSIBLE.
I was really tempted by
£540 - and the bragging rights that would go with it. "Expensive to insure, you ask? Not at all, I have fully comp on it, Central London, for five hundred quid" Would have been a pleasure to say but in the end I went for:-
http://www.classiclineinsurance.co.uk £800, but a much better Excess of only £250, full foreign use, UK breakdown, Legal cover, and in the few phone calls I've had with them they seem to be easy to deal with and are UK based. Being a classic policy removes my question about whether to protect my NCB or not, now it is simply "parked" until I have a 'normal' motor policy in the future.