Tower Insurance Review
Read our Tower Insurance review to discover whether this is the insurance brand for you.
- Promoted Insurance Offer
- Join Cove & you’ll get one month free on your new insurance policy
- Quote & buy insurance online in as little as two minutes
- Your discount will automatically be applied on the payment page.
- Average Customer Rating: 4.9/5
- 100% online & made with love in New Zealand.
Important note about this Tower Insurance Review
We’ve done our best to ensure this review accurately represents the products this brand offers, however we can’t guarantee the content is fully up to date and 100% accurate. The only place you will find that is on the brands official website and within their policy documents. Treat this guide as a starting point, and if you need clarification, certainty, or more information, you need to contact the insurance brand directly.
Who is Tower Insurance?
Tower Insurance is seen as one of the older insurance companies in NZ, but in recent years it has pushed hard to become a digital leader. Tower provides the full range of general insurance: car insurance, home, contents, landlord, travel, business, renters, motorbike, boat, lifestyle block and farm, caravan, trailer, and motorhome insurance.
Tower is also the only insurance brand to offer Airpoints with their policies, which is nice. If you want Flybuys however you’ll have to go take a look at State Insurance. You can read our State Insurance review here.
Tower is often seen as one of the more “Kiwi owned” insurance companies in NZ, and this is largely because it started by the New Zealand government in 1869 during the creation of the New Zealand Government Life Insurance Department (also known simply as Government Life). This changed into TOWER Corporation in 1987 when the several government departments/organisations were being corporatized or converted into state owned enterprises.
Super Quick Tower Insurance Review
Out of all the insurance companies in NZ, I’ve got a feeling that New Zealanders view Tower Insurance as one of the older kids on the block… a little outdated and smells like a second hand book shop.
BUT, before I get a few angry emails, this impression is wrong. These days, Tower provides one of the slickest digital experiences in the insurance industry in New Zealand. They have recently refreshed their website and its now on-par, if not better, than State, AMI, AA Insurance etc.
What do we love (and not love) about Tower Insurance?
What are Kiwis Saying about Tower?
Bonus Tower Insurance Reviews
For most insurance companies in NZ, you can find a tonne of reviews from customers around the web. Lucky for you, we’ve done the hard work and read dozen of AA Insurance reviews, and posted a small cross-section of comments below. We’ve tried to showcase a few positive reviews alongside some negative reviews. Every single insurance company will have a mix of both, so don’t let a few negative reviews put you off!
Tower Insurance Reviews on Google
As at the time of writing (some time in 2020), Tower Insurance has 300 reviews on Google. Their average rating on this platform is 3.3 stars out of 5, which isn't horrible - but also isn't exceptional. One of the more positive comments is "Great Services and with having now 3 policies with Tower, the discount is really good. I did my vehicle insurance online and was super easy. Plus easier enough to do anything over the phone as well". Ex-Tower customer Mark wasn't so positive when saying " would strongly advise anyone who is considering obtaining contents insurance from Tower to steer well clear. I made a claim for a number of items stolen in a burglary. Tower will answer the telephone immediately to assist you with purchasing a policy, however when it came time to make the claim i was placed on hold for hours and my claim was met by an investigation team of ex policeman that treated me like a criminal and subjected me to hours of intense cross examination"
Tower Insurance on Discussions Forums
We found plenty of Tower Insurance reviews on discussion forums, but here is the most interesting from a Tower employee: "We know it's shit that we can't give out the 10% discount over the phone. Management is extremely strict when it comes to that and a lot of our calls are audited for things just like that. Right now they just started a 20% online only discount for a limited time, and the rules we were given for that are a bit more relaxed than usual. We can give out the 20% discount to new customers if you explicitly ASK about it, or if you are an existing customer and threaten to cancel a policy and then renew it just to get the discount. Tower doesn't really give a shit about existing customers, they focus is new business."
Common Tower Insurance Questions
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What Products does Tower Offer?
As mentioned in the introduction to our Tower review, the full suite of general insurance products is available. We’ve touched on some of the main ones below.
Car Insurance
Tower, like most other brands reviewed on this website, offers three types of car insurance. These are third party, third party fire and theft, and third party car insurance.
House Insurance
Towers house insurance policy also takes part in the one event, one excess arrangement noted above in their contents insurance review.
Something that Tower features prominently on their website in the fact that if your home is destroyed by fire, they’ll rebuild it, even if it actually costs more than your sum insured value.
With Tower you can choose from three levels of cover when it comes to house insurance; standard, plus, and premium. There is nothing dramatically different between the three of them, but to better understand what the differences actually are we recommend checking out the page we link to below.
Contents Insurance
Towers contents insurance policy offers new for old replacement, meaning they’ll replace or repair your contents (up to the limits in your policy wording including your sum insured limit).
They also have what’s called one event, one excess, which essentially means if you have one accident which triggers a claim under multiple policies you hold with Tower, you’ll only have to pay one excess.