As Youi’s advertisements say: At Youi, we get you. Spoken by a smug looking guy with a face you can’t help but want to punch (I’m sure he is a nice guy, maybe).
After my recent experiences hunting down insurance for a brand new car, I have come to the conclusion that Youi are a bunch of scam artists who cannot compete with any other insurer out there. Considerably more expensive than any other insurer (even Suncorp) even though their ads claim they can save you hundreds.
Do not buy into the hype. If you are considering Youi or perhaps with Youi, you will definitely save a lot of money shopping around. Whatever you do, do not put your number into the online quote form. They will harass you for days and weeks trying to get you to signup. Even if you tell them you are not interested, they will still persist.
I think Youi operate on this business model of not wanting you to drive. If you perhaps only drive your car on the weekends and it is garaged during the week, Youi might give you a decent rate. However, what if you need to drive somewhere during the week out of routine and you get into an accident? Does Youi pay the claim or do your answers get used against you?
This leads into another line of questioning. If you hardly drive your car and Youi impose restrictions based on your answers, they are essentially taking your money knowing that the chances of you making a claim are probably extremely low (depending on how often you drive), what is the point?
The Youi that you see in the television advertisements is considerably different to the Youi that you get when you call them up or deal with them. I never thought to do any online sleuthing about Youi until I recently did some Googlegating and came across some pretty hairy stuff.
When you actually look, you see some horror stories. They have a really low rating, their social media team even seem to acknowledge that they are more expensive, albeit, indirectly. Just from their Twitter account, here and here.
Then I came across an article about an investigation into Youi New Zealand. Even though I only dealt with the Australian branch of Youi, it really highlights what kind of company Youi is on the inside. Systematically engineered to make their staff resort to dodgy tactics to make sales because Youi are more expensive than any of their competitors.
Then I came across this product reviews site which has close to 649 reviews of Youi. Of those reviews, 442 were rated the worse “terrible”, 62 were bad and a few other more neutral ratings. Only 87 of those were rating excellent which is the highest.
I will not post any of the reviews here, but go check them out yourself. The recurring theme in the negative reviews is cost, pushy sales staff and questions that should have no bearing on insurance like marital status and weirdly enough, what type of phone someone used. Is Youi just a market data collection front? Would explain how they afford their TV spots and that smug guy they use in all of them.
It is obvious Youi do not want to insure people who actually drive their car. The ideal customer that Youi seems to want is people who like spending lots of money, hardly drive their car and fall victim to to their sensationalist tv ads that claim to save you hundreds of dollars per year.
In the end I chose RACQ because they offered everything Youi did, they did not ask me stupid questions because I could do it all online and best of all: I was not forced into choosing them.
At the end of the day, you should make your own informed decisions when it comes to insurance, shop around and play companies off one another. Just don’t expect Youi to negotiate any less than a 10% discount on their quoted price. Stand firm.
Let this post serve as a warning that the Youi you see on TV is not the Youi you will get when you call them up and get a quote, after their gruelling 30 minute question process. Perhaps you might get a good quote, you would be the exception and definitely not the rule.
When Youi say “they get you” they literally mean it. They’ll get you good, just like those people standing in the middle of the shopping centre trying to get you to buy overpriced cosmetic products that do not work.
