From free robots to blockbuster movies
5 COMPARISON WEBSITES
FREEBIES should not be the main grounds for choosing an important financial product – but it has not stopped many comparison websites offering them to sway a customer’s decision to sign up to a new insurer, credit card company or utility provider using their particular service.
Confused offers a free ‘Brian’ robot for each policy bought through its website, while six million Meerkat soft toys have been claimed by customers using comparethemarket since 2011.
The website recently added an ‘either or’ option – a toy or ‘Meerkat Movies’ which is a twofor-one cinema ticket deal every Tuesday and Wednesday for a year. It says someone using the scheme to the maximum could save £350 a year on the cost of tickets.
The cinema ticket offer has proved attractive to film buff Joe Gren, 27, from Fulham, West London, who goes to the cinema several times a month.
Joe had been mourning the withdrawal earlier this year of the similar twofor-one Orange Wednesdays cinema deal that as an Orange mobile phone customer had saved him a fortune on movie outings.
Joe, a foreign exchange trader, says: ‘I needed an annual travel insurance policy as I’m going to New York with my girlfriend later in the year. I’m also planning another holiday to Portugal so I thought I might as well buy the cover through comparethemarket and get cheap movie tickets.’
Joe has already made use of his membership, going with friends to see action film Fast and Furious 7 starring Vin Diesel and the late Paul Walker.
He has a long list of movies he wants to catch in the coming months and is impatient to see Avengers: Age of Ultron with Robert Downey Jr, and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens that reunites the original Star Wars 1970s cast, including Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill.
Joe says: ‘All I had to do was download an app and then shake my phone to produce a code that I can use all year to buy my two-for-one tickets.’