- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 10
By way of background, I'm a serving Army officer at CFB Edmonton and am currently insured with The Personal Insurance Company of Canada (and have been for over 10 years). I'm sure that there are a number of other CF personnel currently serving in the Edmonton area or who are posted into the area this APS who may also be dealing with The Personal for automobile or home insurance. Following a conversation with The Personal today regarding my automobile insurance policy, I feel compelled to warn my fellow CF members about what I believe to be rather spurious conduct on their part. My wife and I have lived in St Albert, a community northwest of the Base, for the past five years. We have just sold our home and are moving approximately 1 km into a newly constructed home in another sub-division in St Albert. I contacted The Personal today to square away insurance for our new home and to change the address on our automobile policy. At this point I was advised that The Personal and some other insurance companies had recently adopted a new practice of calculating insurance premiums based upon your postal code, rather than upon the area you lived in as a whole. In our case, moving 1 km from the sub-division of Deer Ridge to the new sub-division of North Ridge was going to result in a premium increase on our two vehicles of $811.00 per year! Yes, that's correct, $811.00!!! We currently pay approximately $2,200.00 per year to insure our two vehicles so this represents an increase of close to 30 percent over what we are paying now. I should point out that both my wife and I have perfect driving records and have both been insured continuously for over 10 years. I was shocked and appauled by the increase and couldn't believe that this practice had been adopted throughout the industry. When I got off the phone with The Personal, I opened the Yellow Pages and phoned the first company I came across, which happened to be Allstate. Ten minutes later I had a quote from Allstate of $1949.00 to insure us with the same coverages provided by The Personal. I've never dealt with Allstate in my life and they've quoted me a rate that's $250.00 cheaper, in North Ridge, than what I'm paying The Personal now for coverage in Deer Ridge. I found out from the Allstate rep that they consider St Albert as a whole, hence the lower rate. After receiving the quote from Allstate, I called The Personal back and asked to speak with a manager, thinking in my head that if I had a lower quote from another company, that at the very least they would try to match it. No joy. All I got was a "we're terribly sorry but the rate quoted is the best we can do, and we understand if you choose to purchase insurance elsewhere." Talk about trying to secure customer loyalty. I've never seen such a poor effort in my life. What is most shocking though, is that I've been with The Personal for over ten years and have always thought that they provided better rates to CF members than any other company on the market. Please don't believe this - I've seen first hand that this is not the case. My advice to anyone planning to move to St Albert is to shop around for auto insurance. You'll be glad you did.