We explore how you can maximise your savings when purchasing private hire insurance at Zego.
There are a lot of important factors to consider when starting private hire work and among these is the cost of insurance. While your insurance is calculated based on your individual details, there are some key ways you can ensure you keep the price of your cover as low as possible. In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the central factors that affect how much your private hire insurance costs and explain how you can keep your policy premium down. What affects the price of my cover? Before explaining some top tips about how you can keep your insurance costs low, it is important to first understand how your policy premium is calculated. Your quotation for private hire insurance is based on the details you provide us with when you sign up. Various factors such as the type of vehicle you drive, how long you’ve held your licence, your driving history and any claims history are all taken into consideration when calculating your policy premium. This process is called underwriting and is why insurance varies in price depending on the individual. This is also the central reason why it is unlikely that you would be paying the same amount as a friend or family member.
Top tips for reducing your policy premium:
1. Driving safety - Sense
Since one of the key aspects of the underwriting process is analysing your driving history, being aware of your experience and safety as a driver is imperative. At Zego we understand the importance of safe driving and through our Zego Sense App, we’re able to provide you with the fairest price based on your driving behaviour. Your driver safety rating is calculated with a variety of insights from the application. Preventing any harsh or sudden adjustments to your speed by ensuring your acceleration and braking is smooth is one of the ways you can benefit your driver safety rating. Other aspects of your driving analysed by Sense include your cornering as well as appropriate rest times during working hours to ensure you remain alert. Since a high safety rating as a driver is an indication of low risk, maintaining this can benefit you in the long term by reducing your policy premium.
2. Long term policies
Reducing the price of your private hire cover is not always easy, however, the equally important task of finding the most suitable policy for you is made easy at Zego. Although a policy may be cheap, this does not necessarily mean it is right for you. For instance, our Third Party Only cover may be the least expensive but, if you are a full-time driver, you may prefer our Fully Comprehensive options for the higher level of cover.
Generally, you would be saving more on your insurance in the long term by committing to an annual policy since purchasing a full year of cover is commonly less expensive than renewing 12 consecutive 30-day policies. Keep in mind that 12 consecutive 30-day policies do not complete a full year since some months have 31 days. For the equivalent amount of cover as an annual period, one would need to purchase just over 12 policies. With a 30-day policy, it is also possible that your premium can vary from month to month, which means you could end up paying even more than you would with an annual policy.
An important note is that annual policies are most cost-effective when paid upfront because there are no additional interest charges, unlike paying in monthly instalments. We do understand that paying a large sum upfront is not always feasible and as such we can also offer the alternative of paying in monthly instalments. These monthly instalments would be arranged through Premium Credit Limited (PCL) and would be paid with a 10% interest rate. If you are a new customer to Zego, an upfront deposit would be followed by 9 monthly instalments. Existing customers looking to renew an active policy would not be expected to pay any deposit, instead, there would just be 10 monthly instalments. There is not any payment for the remaining few months of cover since at this time the policy would have already been paid off.
3. NCD
Over time, you can reduce the cost of your cover through the accumulation of No Claims Discount (NCD) if you have stayed at Zego for one year without any cancellations or claims on your policy. Unlike some other companies, at Zego we also offer NCD for 30-day policyholders if there have been consistent renewals for a full year and no gaps in between policies. If you have proof of NCD from your previous company you can declare this when setting up your policy to reduce the quotation.
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