My renewal premium this year for the 325d (Cornmarket, used to be Adelaide, through IAM) went up by about 25%, to £350 or so. Thinking they might have just been bumping it up through customer inertia (though they're usually very good and don't normally behave like that), I went onto the usual comparison sites.

The cheapest I could find was more than £600 !

Needless to say, I stayed with Cornmarket.

Even if they hadn't been the cheapest, I probably will continue to do so as long as they're relatively competitive. Every single person has always been a pleasure to deal with on the phone, you never have to wait for ages to speak to someone, they call you back when they say they will.

Renewed mine for the Sportback in mid-June.

Paid £167something last year. This year they wanted £222. I began the annual arduous online trawl...

...was really quite disappointed to discover that I could achieve anything barely around the £200 mark.

Phoned current provider to ask 'what could they do for me'. £15 discount was all they would offer so begrudgingly I took it.

Similar scenario with Buildings & Contents insurance last month. Again, quite difficult to get a decent reduction so I went back onto my current provider's site as a new customer. Price dropped by £35 so I saved the quote and took it the day before renewal. However, after securing the quote I rang to again ask 'what could they do for me'. Mentioned that the best quote was with them as a new customer. She virtually agreed that's what you have to do, i.e. nothing to stop you applying again as a newbie.

Interestingly, as Doubleug has suggested, in recent times I've 'bookmarked' new quotes which tell me on=screen thast the price is valid for 30/60-days only to find when I've revisited the quote (and made no changes whatsoever) that the price has increased!

Seems to be a 'modern trend' unfolding?

Win some, lose some, caveat emptor and all that jazz, repeat to fade...

When using comparison sites I always use a new incognito window (Chrome) for each enquiry in the hope of bamboozling their tracking.

I do the same when checking airfares.

Whether it really helps I don't know, because unlike airfares checking they collect the users details, but it makes me feel better.

The sad thing is that none of this is much of a surprise. The "difficulty with the website pricing" is BS in my opinion and I wouldn't be surprised if this insurer jacked up their price slightly because they knew your current insurer would still be more expensive.

The amount of times I've refreshed comparison results and gotten completely different quotes is mind-boggling. From my experience, getting quotes a couple of months in advance gets the best result.