I'd really like to give a 2.5 star (meaning there are some okay to good aspects, and some bad aspects), so here goes -- in no particular order:
1. Vi Tran is very nice and pretty professional. He's pretty friendly and tries to keep you relatively informed.
However, he can be a tad busy at times.
2. Allstate was definitely more expensive -- and sometimes by quite a bit. (When GEICO says they can save you 15% in 15 minutes, they saved me more than 15%.)
3. The billing was a little tricky and I had to call up to figure out what was going on.
They switched me from one-time annual payment for the first car -- and buying a second car, they only made the insurance out to the end of the term for the first car (so it was pro-rated and looked pretty good) -- and then switched me to a monthly payment of 10%. This was a bit confusing but fortunately Vi explained what was going on. The car payment suddenly looked pretty decent -- but in fact, wasn't.
4. I'd really not like to knock Vi on this, but Vi did send quite a few people over to NLC / New London County Insurance for home insurance. I'm guessing Vi makes a hundred or so dollars per recommendation and NLC just plain sucks.
As mentioned in my review of NLC, they took 8 business days (12 days) to create an insurance binder when this could have been done in 48 hours or less. NLC was less than responsive in these 8 business days. That should have tipped me off that they were going to be bad. They didn't honor my security system installation certificate that I faxed in, and then their home inspector outright lied to say that he tried to contact me three times and didn't, so NLC closed my file.
Upon complaining to Vi about NLC, he merely said it was too bad because he sent NLC a lot of business. (!!!)
5. Vi does have some automatic emails (maybe he uses Constant Contact or something), so that is a mixed blessing. It can be interesting for some of the tips, but sometimes it's just spam.
6. They are open weekends (Saturday) for limited hours.
7. There is meter parking near them and non-meter time-limited parking a bit further away.
So here was the breakdown.
Vi was willing to do some discounts because we would have home and 2 vehicles (step 9). I believe it was close to $1200 per year for the first vehicle (2010 car), and then 8 month pro-rated second vehicle was $433. The home insurance through NLC was about $1300 including discount.
I switched to Baystate Insurance and GEICO and both were cheaper. I believe Baystate was about $1100-1200 and GEICO was under $900 for both cars.
Customer service rating: 3-3.5 stars
Product rating: 1-2 stars
Bottom line: If you want to be nicely asked to pay more money than you should... read more
