My renewal is coming up soon (12th may) so i logged onto Aviva's website to check my renewal price and they were asking for £1150! i spoke to someone to ask why they had quoted me so high and they said it was just due to my age and the high insurance group of my car. They managed to get the price down to £1000 but i'm not paying that so told them i want it to cancel.

One thing that is a must for insurance is New car replacement as i change car every ~9 months.

I went onto confused to check prices and the cheapest one on there is £570 with Swiftcover. As they do offer new car replacement, i checked some reviews and most say to avoid at all costs. Next were all the admiral group ones (Admiral, Elephant, Bell etc) but i've always heard bad things about them so generally always avoid (plus they don't offer new car replacement). Anyone have anything to say about either of these? good experiences? bad experiences?

Next one up is Hastings for £800 which seems to have good reviews on the internet except they charge admin fees for nearly everything. Anyone with any experiences with these also?

So finally (sorry for a bit of an essay), do i go for the cheapest one swiftcover or fork out a little bit more for a company who has much better reviews?

Swiftcover are AXA (or at least owned by AXA) so there shouldn't be a problem there. Their websites are identical anyway, so you should be able to get a similar quote from AXA. I switched to them recently and they seem to be very good. Also you get a 10% discount for having a dashcam with either of these, so basically a free dashcam :)

Swift cover are useless bell pieces. They deliberately held up my claim so they thought I would be forced to renew with them at about 600 more than anyone else. I threatened them with all sorts and eventually got through to a manager who I threatened to hold personally responsible and would be using his name to complain the the fca and the ombudsman. He laughed. I then told him a few other things about the rules they broke and also taught him a few things, his tone changed. He thought I was empty treating him. All of a sudden within 24 hours of my policy being due renewal I had his confirmation it'd all sorted. After threatening him it took 3 days to have it sorted.

After reading that I'm hoping Swiftcover are only underwritten by AXA, and not actually the same staff handling the claims.

They are underwritten as opposed to managed by or pretending to be.

Give them their dues though Admiral where pretty good and I got them to add mods on their mostly for just the 40 quid admit fees. So I just gave them a list of about 12 things I was going to do, got it added for 40 quid and then got on with adding them.