SAGA today announced that it has launched ConfidentCover.com, a car insurance price comparison site for the over-50s. Confident Cover.com has innovative tools that enable customers to tailor their cover so they get the right cover at a great price from a panel of insurers.

Research amongst nearly 16,000 people aged over 50 on the Saga-Populus Panel shows that almost seven in 10 over 50s (69 percent) have visited an online aggregator to research car insurance. However less than half (44 percent) have actually bought a policy in this way.

There are however significant regional variations, with people in Yorkshire (49 percent) and the North East (49 percent) being most likely to buy online and those in Northern Ireland (38 percent) and East Anglia (38 percent) being the least likely. (see table in notes to editors)

The reason why people appear happy to check prices but less keen to buy appears to be because sites don't give people enough information. Almost half (43 percent) of those questioned agreed strongly that generic online comparison sites were useful to determine headline prices, but they would rather call the insurance companies directly so they know what is and what isn't included in the overall price.

The need for reassurance about the policy terms can be explained by the fact that over four in five (83 percent) people thought that comparison web sites focussed on the lowest quote rather than the policy details. In addition, just under four out of five (79 percent) thought they were not clear about what the cover included, such as courtesy cars, and whether the policy allowed you to drive other people's cars.

A further 79 percent said they would find it more useful to have proper policy and price details on 20 or so policies from recognised insurers, than limited information from several hundred companies.

Andrew Goodsell, Chief Executive, Saga Group, commented: "Today's over 50s are increasingly web-savvy. However, a number told us that they were not confident that they would get the cover they wanted if they used a generic price comparison site. So we created ConfidentCover.com in response to that need.

Factors such as excess, availability of a courtesy car and call centre location are important, and often the only way of finding out, for example, how many days European cover a policy offers, is to call all the insurance companies one-by-one which rather defeats the original purpose. ConfidentCover.com is the only insurance comparison website which allows users to compare over 30 policy features side-by-side, as well as the premium.