It also helps being organised. Someone told me the other day a factor that had never even considered. If you sort your insurance 3-4 weeks in advance, you are more organised than someone sorting days before. The people leaving til the last minute are prone to leave everything in life til the last minute so rush & become more of a risk so likely to have the same mindset when travelling
Yes, leaving until the last minute before sorting out your insurance does generally mean the price will be higher.
Also, insurance companies will always be looking for new risk factors that they can use in their assessment of risks and calculation of premiums to;
a) make their prices more competitive relative to the prices of their competitors
b) improve the selection of risks they want to insure
c) improve the profitability of their book of business.
Insurance company pricing algorithms are very sophisticated these days; gone are the days when premiums would be calculated by an insurance company employee using a paper-based rate book or a spreadsheet with just a handful of risk factors (e.g. claims history, driver age, car make/model and postcode) to calculate premiums. Nowadays multiple risk factors are used, some of which might not seem to be entirely relevant to the risk of insuring a car - e.g. a person’s credit rating. Credit rating is an indication of a person’s ability to pay and apparently it’s been statistically proven that there’s a strong correlation between the ability to pay and the insurance risk (poor credit rating; more likely to claim, good credit rating; less likely to claim).
This increased sophistication makes it almost impossible for individuals to compare premiums with one another to determine whether or not the price they’ve been quoted is realistic. IMHO, for anyone who feels the price they’ve been quoted by their current insurance company is too high, then it is better to
shop around and use the comparison sites or a high street broker to get a range of premiums that are specific to them, rather than compare with other individuals whose risk profiles are likely to be very different.