Review: Axa Home Insurance
By
Ronny Lavie
Summary
300-year old insurance provider Axa – trading under its current name since 1985 – is one of the biggest insurance companies in the world. It operates in 59 countries, employing more than 161,000 people, who look after 103 million customers.
Home insurance is one of several insurance products offered by Axa, encompassing both commercial and personal cover.
Get a quote from the Axa home insurance website.
Overview of cover provided by Axa home insurance
Customers can choose from buildings only cover, contents only cover, or a combination of the two. Within these, standard features are: up to £1 million buildings’ insurance, contents cover up to £85,000, and access to a 24-hour claims line staffed by a UK-based help team.
On top of this, you can select policy extras to add further protection. For example, Axa home insurance upgrades include accidental damage cover, personal possessions protection up to £25,000 – including separate bicycle cover up to £1,000 per bike (£2,500 in total per household), and £50,000 legal cover for personal injury or property damage claims.
Policyholders can also select Axa’s home assistance; a domestic repair helpline, which arranges for emergency contractors to fix urgent problems. The service covers you for up to £1,000 per claim, for costs such as call out charges, materials and labour.
Axa customers can manage the policy online, to make changes without having to contact its call centre.
Get your personalised Axa home insurance quote online.
How much does Axa home insurance cost?
Policies start from around £115 - 15% of new Axa customers who took out a policy from Jan-March 2015 paid this figure.
However, the exact price of your premium will depend on what level of cover you choose, your individual circumstances, and whether you opt to pay in a single instalment or via monthly direct debit.
Get an Axa home insurance quote tailored to your needs here.
What do Axa home insurance reviews from customers say?
Reviews from Axa home insurance customers are a mixed bag. On money.co.uk Axa were awarded 3.6 stars out of 5, giving it a rating of 'good'. 27% out of the 88 customers who left reviews said they would recommend the service.
On reviewcentre.com, Axa home insurance only received 1.6 out of 5 stars, with 16% out of 96 customers saying they would recommend the insurer. It’s a similar story on Trustpilot – 1.7 out of 5 stars, giving Axa home insurance a rating of bad. 80% of 25 reviews were 1 star reviews, though 12% were 5 star reviews.
Which? readers have awarded Axa a 55% customer satisfaction score.
In our experience , reviews for insurance companies need careful consideration as we often note a bias in the reviews and the scores. For example - sometimes reviews appear to have been written after the purchasing process and so their rating only reflects how easy the insurance was to buy, and does not refer to the quality of the service after the purchase. Sometimes the reviews appear overwhelmingly negative, due to the fact that people with a negative experience are more motivated to write the review. As such, we believe some thought is needed to ensure that reviews and star ratings are interpreted correctly.
What do the experts say?
In the same study as that mentioned above, Which? gave Axa 59% on its buildings-only cover and 63% on its contents cover. This, along with the customer satisfaction score, gave Axa home insurance an overall rating of 58%, placing it 34th out of 38th providers reviewed.
Defaqto – the independent reviewer of financial products – gave Axa home insurance policies the following scores:
Advanced – 5 out of 5 stars, making it ‘an excellent product with a comprehensive range of features and benefits’
Exclusive - 4 out of 5 stars, making it ‘a product with a good level of features and benefits’
Extra, First and Axa Direct higher and standard limits - 3 out of 5 stars, making it ‘a standard product providing an average level of features and benefits’
