Whether you choose
to go direct to a top home insurer or you prefer to compare
quotes online, you can get home content insurance cover easily and
quickly online without needing to get buildings cover as well.
Most home owners tend to use price comparison sites to find cheap home
content insurance quotes nowadays. The conveneience of comparing
numerous quotes with one form along with the likely cost-savings make
them an attractive choice.
Others favour going direct for a home content insurance
policy, which, in fact, has much to recommend it. The
reasons for this are that by going direct to top UK home insurers, the
cover you get is at a better level than the ultra-economy variants that
score highly on price comparison sites. You also get to select from
trusted insurance providers yourself. You have easy access to full
policy information, which is not the case with a price comparison site.
Tailoring of home content insurance policies to
match your needs is also easier. Quote forms are briefer and simpler to
fill in than those used by price comparison sites.
The belief that a home content insurance comparison via an
automated system is essential is actually an erroneous assumption.
Normal market forces ensure that like policies are closely priced. The
UK affection for price comparison sites ought really to be understood
as the marketing triumph that it is rather than a knee-jerk necessity
when you buy home content insurance cover in the UK.
The reality is, however, that people are tightly yoked to the idea of
saving money on the cost of their home content insurance
with the effect that the above advantages of going direct tend to be
trumped by this desire to buy cheap cover just because it's cheap but
not, of course, because it's better.
It will take more than an article like this to persuade people to think
again on this quality issue. The need for better and accurate policy
information when you buy via a price comparison site certainly is
something the FSA could be bringing to the UK public's notice in a more
prominent way than it currently does via appropriate guidelines or
legislation. As ever, you pay for what you get and if you buy cheap,
you get cheap.
In our view, while we don't necessarily say that you should never use a
price comparison site for home content insurance
(we do work with three of them here!), we certainly advise people to
check over their cover first. This may include a visit to each
insurer's website to get the details you need for an informed choice.