This may be obvious but I should mention that you should never insure anything which you can afford to replace. To argue the contrary is to argue that insurers lose money 
So always go for the highest excess (“deductible” in US-speak) the insurer will offer you and which you are happy with. This usually reduces the premium substantially.
Peter wrote:
So always go for the highest excess (“deductible” in US-speak) the insurer will offer you and which you are happy with. This usually reduces the premium substantially.
In France, and after extensive inquiries (I should be black listed at this moment ), that is not true.
AXA had an excess (thanks for you correction ) of initially 3000€, which I further negotiated down to 2000€.
I have others contrary examples, which make things confusing / opaque. In the end, you are unable to understand what you buy, and how the risk is actually calculated.
I found the time spent in this research “educating”, and must confess I hadn’t done that initially.
Well, anything is possible, but at least you tried.
The other thing you should not do is to get too many quotes if giving out your aircraft reg because each quote gets you (in the UK, anyway) blacklisted from the market for 30 days. This is done using the aircraft reg. That may not be true today but it is what they told me when I did this in 2002. I got about 20 quotes (like some people do for cars) and then got some very rude phone calls. I got away with it because the delivery of the plane was delayed by about 2 months so the block was removed by the time I actually needed the insurance.
Try Florian Braasch in Germany.
I found that he has very reasonable prices.
@Jan_Olieslagers yes, it was Finserve in Antwerp. Very positive experience
I agree with you Peter, there should be a balance between premium and excess.
But the market seems to be more complex, with variable interest in aviation from the insurance company.
I didn’t inquire 20 brokers, rather 6-7, and got disparate answers.
The offer from Verspieren is partnership with AOPA and they benefit from a lot of subscribe, hence the better conditions.
We’ll see through trial of time… :-)
PS: one other thing strange I noticed. I had two proposition with Aviabel. One from an English broker, one from a French. The public liability was 1000€ in first case, 1350€ in the other, with similar cover. Rather hard to explain..
Peter wrote:
So always go for the highest excess (“deductible” in US-speak) the insurer will offer you and which you are happy with. This usually reduces the premium substantially.
Up to a point, in my experience. After that the premium reduction doesn’t reasonably correspond to the increased excess. (At least not for car and home insurance – I haven’t tried negotiating this with aircraft insurers.)
We bought a 2004 DA 40 180 N REG in 2009 and paid an insurance fee of about 6000€ minus a premium of 400€ for no accident at AVIABEL (LOYDT) for a 150K€ Hull and typical private multi pilots package.
Following year, I asked a quote to a german broker (AXA) which was much lower. AVIABEL aligned its fee to 3700€ minus a premium of 700€ for no accident each year.
I asked a quote last year to a french broker (at France Air Expo in Lyon) but it was not better.
So I would say : ask a few quotes !
If you are member of the AOPA you should check if you can get some group discounts in your country. In Germany we have it, and leaving HDI going to the Achen Münchner with the AOPA agreement was a good and cost saving choice for us.
my lessons learned from buying insurance over the past 10+ years:
1) always read the details – the products USUALLY differ and the brokers rarely tell you
2) always ask for several offers, even if you are happy with current insurer (sometimes nicely surprised)
3) don’t dream about serious cross-border competition in the EU market in the near future, insurers simply don’t see the GA market that way and when I did get a cross-border quote, it was always much higher than the local rates
4) local aeroclubs (in addition to aopa) have good group deals which can be sometimes applied also to private aircraft
