How to obtain low cost Taxi Insurance
Low cost Taxi Insurance
Open up your local yellow pages under the heading of Insurance and you may well be overwhelmed by the amount of companies advertising there. With so many to choose from it would be an impossibility to make contact with them all too give them all your details and then keep a log of all the prices, terms, instalment payments, quote reference numbers, etc, etc. Most of these insurers would not even be able to offer taxi insurance.
So how should you best approach this?
Well firstly you should obtain a taxi trade magazine, which are available from taxi bases and possibly your local taxi licencing council. In it there will again be many insurers claiming to be the cheapest but at least you know that these companies specialise in taxi insurance. Some of these companies may well have more than 1 trading name so you should read the small print at the bottom of the advert so you don’t waste your time calling the same company twice!!
Secondly the big World Wide Web. Use not only the most popular search engine of Google but also MSN, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, etc as they will all search differently and give you different results. Your obvious search would be taxi insurance’ and this should bring up the pages of the most useful taxi insurer websites of which you will be able to enter your details on their quote forms to obtain either instant quotes or at least a call back from them saving your phone bill.
You will undoubtedly have recommendations made from your fellow cabbies as to who they insure with and who they wouldn’t insure with. These comments should be taken with a pinch of salt as insurance companies can change their rates on a monthly basis and also insurance brokers can deal and decide not too deal with an insurance company on a daily basis. Also no two persons details are exactly the same and you therefore cannot go on what another cabbie is paying just because he is the same age or licencing council as yourself. Insurers also go on details like your whole postcode, make and model of vehicle, age of vehicle, incident record over the last FIVE years, length of driving licence held, length of taxi badge held, etc, etc.
Some taxi office bases may also offer you to join their own taxi fleet insurance policy which they will increase your radio rent in order to pay for it. If you have not yet earned any no claims bonus because you have been renting a cab or been a second driver on a taxi policy then this may be the cheaper option for you. Taxi office bases can have so many vehicles insured that fleet insurance companies offer huge discounts to them and this discount will therefore be passed onto yourself and when you feel it’s time to start your own taxi insurance policy then providing you have been incident free then insurance companies will offer you an introductory no claims bonus providing you can prove this.
Dave Mackenzie
www.connect-insurance.co.uk
