I’ve noticed recently that there are a lot of press adverts for car insurance and home insurance companies proudly stating that they are ‘not on price comparison websites’. Is this a general trend away from the increasingly powerful Price Comparison website, or just a few companies that think the can offer better prices on their own?

I suppose the main temptation for these companies that do proudly claim to be ‘not on price comparison websites’ is that they can not only make more money by not having to pay huge commission fees to the price comparison websites, but also that they can offer part of the saving by offering lower prices to the customer. If this works then more and more customers will ensure that use these advertised insurance websites when they shop around for their car insurance or house insurance. The downside to this is that with the increased power of price comparison websites like Go Compare and Confused.com the insurance companies will have a hard time getting their message across. Whilst the big players like Aviva and Direct Line can spend vast sums of money on television advertising, it does make one wonder if with this added expense their overheads really are that cheaper, and in turn, their prices.

The future of Not included on Price Comparison sites

As the price comparison market becomes saturated and settles down, then I think we’ll see a lowering of costs and more competitive commission deals being struck, and we’ll probably see the big companies like Direct Line and Aviva start to be included on the sites again, but this is a few years off yet. Another alternative is that they will simply start their own price comparison site like Tesco have successfully done with their Tesco Compare website where they offer their own insurance as well as that of the other big companies.

In the meantime, when doing our annual checks on insurance prices, we’ll really have to continue checking these ‘not on price comparison’ websites as well as the other big ones. Of course you can always ignore the loners and go straight for the easy option, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll hate to miss out on a potentially good deal!

Jan 2012: This page still seems to be getting quite a number of views. As far as I know, Aviva and Direct Line are still ‘not on comparison websites’, but I have been pointed in the direction of a specialised site which keeps these things up to date: http://www.notoncomparison.co.uk/. Hope that helps!