Car Insurance - getting a great deal

It came time (once again) for me to renew my car insurance and I wasnt surprised to see a rather large increase in my premium. The floods in other parts of the country coupled with extreme whether conditions were putting pressure on insurers profits and no doubt they were going to try and make this up with premiums across the board.

I have no real loyalty to insurance companies (other than sticking to the big ones as I dont want to be fighting with small internet based insurance companies like Bingle, Budget Direct and Youi if and when I actually do have an accident). I decided to look around for a better deal. I know that a big deal is made of cost comparison websites such as iselect however I found that they do not cover all insurance companies. I suspect that they only cover those that give them commissions for referral which is fine from a business point of view but it also means that I'm definetely not going to use them!

Having established there was no quicker way of doing it, I then went to all the insurers that I was willing to consider (AAMI, RACV, GIO, Allianz etc) and did the online quotes for all of them. Allianz came out ~$100 cheaper for comprehensive insurance than my current insurer (AAMI) was offering me. However I called up AAMI to see if they would price match and they did relatively easily and without hassle.

The reason that you're able to save a fair bit of money by doing this is that insurers seem to love offering great deals to get new customers. An existing customer however is much more valuable from a profitability point of view (churn is expensive) so insurers are always willing to drop their premiums. Moral of the story - never ever renew your insurance premium at the offered rate!