GEICO has the highest amount of complaints in Hawaii

Lava blows from a cinder cone and flows through a channel at Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.

USGS photo [found here]


The below was [found here] on the web.

I admit it. I do like that heavily accented Geico gecko. It’s one of the commercials that comes on my car radio that doesn’t cause me to immediately switch the dial. The Geico cavemen? Them I could live without. (Thankfully, as their quickly canceled television show proved, so could most of the rest of the country.)

But just because Geico has the best commercials, doesn’t necessarily mean it has the most fans. Especially not in Hawaii.

The Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumers Affairs Insurance Division recently published a comparison of motor vehicle insurance for all its islands. It also published customer complaint ratios for all the carriers in the state. Seems Geico, cute lizard and all, had the highest number of complaints on Oahu. In all, Geico totaled 106 complaints on the island. American International Company came in second with 54 complaints.

Liberty Mutual Insurance had the highest ratio of complaints on the island, though, for every 1,000 autos. The company led the way with a score of 0.667. Geico again scored high, though, finishing second with a complaints ratio per 1,000 autos of .0578.

The number of complaints and the complaint ratios are based on written complaints that the Hawaiian insurance division received from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31 of 2007 for 11 insurance companies that write more than 95 percent of the auto insurance policies in the state. Not all of the complaints, of course, will have been found to have been justified.

I don’t know about you, but these kind of lists always fascinate me. It’s always interesting to see which companies are generating the most complaints. Check with your own state if you’re considering changing insurance companies. You never know if they’ll have a list like the one in Hawaii. Be careful, though, of judging any company only on the number of complaints it receives. The key is that we don’t know how many written complaints truly are justified and how many are filed by the cranks of the world.

Comments posted to above piece as of 8 AM EST, January 26, 2009:

1. Steven G. Erickson Says:
   January 5th, 2009 at 10:16 pm

   GEICO will leave you hanging, check out comment # 12:
   http://starkravingviking.blogspot.com/2008/11/geico.html

   Your medical bills might not be paid, your lost wages might not be paid, and GEICO might just string you along.

   Do yourself and your community a favor don’t get GEICO auto insurance, it is like not having insurance.