Greetings all,

As some of you may remember, I wrote a while ago about comparing comparison sites.

It’s that time of year again, so no surprise that I received a stupidly large (£350) renewal quote – from Swinton, underwritten by Premier Underwriting.

So I did my normal annual scout around the comparison sites & found a much better deal (£188) – from Swinton, underwritten by Premier Underwriting!??

I then spotted that I could get £40 cashback if I bought from Swinton via Quidco – so… off I go (on another machine sitting next to this one) & clickthrough from Quidco & start entering my details – I actually kept the £188 quote from Swinton open on this machine & copied every single field of the form identically. Guess what the quote was after clicking through Quidco? £222! What? How cheeky – they upped the premium by £34 to cover the cashback – but wait – what’s that small print? £222 is after the £40 cashback! – So they actually bumped up the premium by £74 when clicking through from Quidco rather than confused.com

Not happy with this at all. To make matters worse – when I tried to actually buy the £188 quote – it was forcing me into monthly payments of £19.60 – & adding a hefty chunk of interest on at the same time. I clicked the ‘modify’ link & changed my preference from monthly to annual & it still insisted on quoting me a monthly premium – which has now risen to £24.16 – although I now see a link that says “Do you want to pay annually?” – clicking this link then presents me with an annual premium of £232.

So – as I said in the title of this blog post – is this as it seems & Swinton are guilty of Shady practices or is it a genuine error?

Here are a few screenshots (with personal information blurred).

confused.com showing an annual premium of £188

A click through to Swinton & I still see the £188 annual premium

Here's what I get after keying EXACTLY the same details after clicking through Quidco

Here's how the £188 quote looks after selecting 'Annual' rather than 'Monthly' - Note that it's still trying to push me into monthly payments - but a link has appeared to switch to Annual

& when I do click the link to switch to annual payment - the premium jumps up to £232

Remember that for all of the above quotes – the exact same details have been entered – word for word.

So – What did I do? I went with the £19.60 per month option & phoned to see if I could pay them the whole year in one go & forego the interest & credit agreement. A really nice lady @ the Farnborough branch of Swinton, said she couldn’t help personally but was confident that her Manager could if I called back on Monday…