Other Is there an Irish price comparison website for general insurance?

K

kim

Registered User
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133
Hi
just wondering is there a website in Ireland thats like confused.com or price comparrison? im trying to get the best deals with my home, life, health, pet and car insurances and its so confusing I'd like a website that displays quotes from all companies and gives you the best deals, im paying huge money monthly between all the insurances I have, well to me its huge money. thanks
 
I just tried that one and its not great. The cheapest quote they gave me for motor insurance was €130 more than with my current insurer..who isn't great either.
 
Insurance costs are rising rapidly at present so it's your call. Ifc you can get it cheaper let us all know.
 
this country is such a rip off, if we are in the EU we should be allowed to shop around with all insurance companies in the EU and not just rip off Ireland. There should be a bit of competition, its crazy! quinn is the cheapest in health insurance I can find and it 47.50 a month which is 570 a year? is that not a crazy price to pay? I am on my own at least, I dont know how families with health insurance can afford to pay, I know of one family 2 adults and 2 kids paying 2000 a year, how is this possible?
 
kim said:
this country is such a rip off, /quote]

It is very easy to issue lewd and off the cuff comments without any substantive comparison. When making comments that XY and Z are cheaper than AB & C, the policies in entire require to be read in full. This refers to foreign Insurance and other Irish companies.
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Yes,
I came across an irish price comparison site which i found very good. See what you think!
 
kim said:
this country is such a rip off, if we are in the EU we should be allowed to shop around with all insurance companies in the EU and not just rip off Ireland.
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We are. If an insurance company from another EU state wishes to market their products in Ireland, they are free to do so. They must be go through a "passporting" process and meet local regulations as regards minimum cover requirements for motor insurance, but it's certainly possible.

The fact that there are few EU insurers offering cover here is because the EU companies make a commercial decision not to. You'd have to ask them why they don't but it's likely that at least some have looked at the Irish market and decided that it would be difficult to make a profit here.

It has nothing to do with "rip off Ireland". A rip-off is where someone is doing something illegal, like, for example, charging a customer a higher price for a repair than normal because it's "an insurance job and the insurance company will be paying."
 
LDFerguson said:
You'd have to ask them why they don't but it's likely that at least some have looked at the Irish market and decided that it would be difficult to make a profit here.
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It’s a bit more than that. Retail insurance, like lending, requires hyper-local knowledge of the market and regulation.

It’s hard to outsource very much and foreign insurers aren’t likely to have any kind of secret sauce to price risk more efficiently.
 
Dr Strangelove said:
It’s a bit more than that. Retail insurance, like lending, requires hyper-local knowledge of the market and regulation.

It’s hard to outsource very much and foreign insurers aren’t likely to have any kind of secret sauce to price risk more efficiently.
Click to expand...
It's a bit more even than that. Retail insurance requires a critical mass of business to justify the overheads of operating in the market. If you're an EU insurer wanting to enter the Irish market, you'd have to spend a lot of time and money (a) establishing a local distribution channel, and (b) promoting yourself. You'd then wait for what might be years to build up a sufficient amount of business so that the operation would even break even. It would be years more before you recovered your establishment costs and started to turn a profit.

Or, you could just buy an existing Irish insurance business, so that from day one you have the critical mass, plus an existing distribution channel.

And of course many foreign insurers have done exactly this; Aviva bought the Hibernian Insurance; Allianz bought the Insurance Corporation of Ireland; AXA bought what used to be the PMPA; etc.

Tl;dr: there's no shortage of international competition in the Irish insurance market. Probably the majority of both general and life insurance companies in Ireland are the Irish branch of a multinational operation that is headquartered elsewhere.

PS: On the original question (asked 16 years ago!) about price comparison websites for insurance — most of these are not consumer-oriented price comparison websites at all; they are sales portals for insurance intermediaries, and they only list products that the intermediary can sell you (and make a commission on).
 
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