Why a charge to change address? (Around the corner)

the butcher

Moving house in a weeks time and tried the 'change address' on the liberty car insurance manage my policy online. It's saying the premium charge is 30 euro even though the house I'm moving to is around the corner (next estate) and my policy is due to be renewed in 3 months time.

Not only that - it says payment by cheque only?! Madness.

I've another car with insurance with An Post and they did it for free, no charge at all to change both. Why is Liberty charging me for this when An Post doesn't? This will be factored into looking around for new insurance policies in September.

Liberty Insurance: Lisa K

Hi the butcher, can you PM me your details so I can check this for you. Lisa

the butcher

Just so others can see what the latest is for changing addresses.

Like other threads on this. They claim it's an admin charge. ADMIN. There's literally no admin on their side...it's literally just us, the customers editing the information! Which is why other companies don't bother adding hidden charges like this. Like An Post did for the other car with ZERO hidden charges and ZERO hassle.

I also got a copy/paste reply via PM - which shows the extent of the customer service.

It makes zero sense for Liberty to charge this especially considering renewal is coming up. So so disappointing and frustrating.

the butcher

Another response via PM - "It clearly state in the policy booklet that a fee may apply for any change that you make to your policy."

An unspecified fee? Why is it 30 euro? Why are Liberty penalising CUSTOMERS for moving house which is stressful as is?

the butcher

This charge should be removed otherwise I'm bringing this further (A solicitor would have a field day with this.)


1. GDPR (the right to have incorrect data amended)
2. Utmost Good Faith (that all dealings are honest, correct and declared)
3. Re-insurance (That you have declared it they must tell their underwriters)
4. Ability to contact you if a claim is made against you
5. Data breach risk from mailing to wrong address

6. This charge is against the Insurance Industry guidelines.

antix80

Playing devil's advocate, but your address affects your insurance (whether they'll cover you, the premium, perhaps insurance terms). So a change to your address is a change to your policy. And regardless of whether you're moving around the corner or to a different county, there's a certain amount of admin required. Posting letters, maybe further underwriting.

Your best bet is to ask liberty to update your correspondence address (for gdpr compliance). And then work out yourself whether €30 is worth paying to ensure your car is now insured to park in your new driveway.

the butcher

There is no further underwriting I was told this is an admin charge for posting letters - which shouldn't cost 30 euro and it's done for free when renewing so it's a complete money grab and with GDPR and various other lines I can explore - I'll proceed further and let people know how this finishes.

antix80

The irony is the more interactions you have with Liberty, the more justification they have to charge such a fee for administration.

the butcher

On a message board?

antix80

You've already received 2 pms and the query is still not closed. Add that to the interaction when you updated your address on the website and that's 4 interactions and the query still isn't closed. 
Some beancounter will say, 4 queries, on average queries take 6 minutes.. maybe we need to increase our admin fee for policy alterations. 

the butcher

If any company took your idea of charging an admin fee for dealing with queries from twitter/boards or any social media outlet you'd find out that they would soon run out of  customers..

antix80

I worked in those companies. Everything query is logged. Document scanned to workflow, codes are used to describe interactions, supervisors take a random sample of the work and rate the CSR.

In fact, I worked with one where the dummy I worked with spent his entire day doing up a log of outstanding queries. He literally did no work during the day apart from typing the query name, date, type, status, etc.. he even entered junk mail onto this query log. He couldn't type, he had extremely low intelligence, his education was a suspect course from a college in lagos, he was untrainable, but for some reason he was a full-time employee and his salary was no doubt factored in to the costs of dealing with queries. 

Way off topic at this stage. Good luck getting your €30 waived as a gesture of goodwill.

the butcher

Update for anyone following this - I contacted the DPC and after them conducting a preliminary analysis, they have now assigned to a case officer to this issue.

buzz11

the butcher wrote: »

Update for anyone following this - I contacted the DPC and after them conducting a preliminary analysis, they have now assigned to a case officer to this issue.

Well done in protesting at the charge...I recently bought house insurance and didn't ask Liberty to quote, why would I with sharp practice like this?

Vangelis Simonidis

I had the same issue where I hold 3 different policies with Liberty (home, motorbike, car) and I tried to change my address 20 days before the expiration of my car policy in order to renew it and I got charged an unreasonable administration fee of 30€. The worst thing is that the customer support agent who started to do this change on my account didn't let me know that in advance, because if she has tried to do this I would let my policy to expire in 18 days and then create a new one with my new address and no administrative fee.
I felt that I was trapped to do so, as the whole process was very misleading both from their website and phone call.

I am now searching to change all of my policies with them and go to a different more customer fair company if they won't take back this charge.

This is totally unacceptable. They are trying to trick their customer for 30€ where my annual premium are close to 2k for all of my policies.