Bummer. Sorry about your bad experience. I'm not used to a week of underwriting review on a personal auto policy. My carriers (in an independent agency) have rating systems that underwrite the risk and have well-defined rigid underwriting guidelines (and behind-the-scenes but also well known appetites that they "suggest" their agents follow wink-wink -- but that can't be enforced against the client if I go ahead and write the policy anyway). That's not to say I don't sometimes need manual review by an underwriter, but it's nigh unheard of to have to send a standard PL auto for a week of review. Of course, sometimes when the agent says "oh I have to send it for review", the translation is "**** I screwed up and this quote is no good, let me stall and deflect blame".
Here's a hypothetical scenario: Mr. Agent runs your auto quote. He's using a rating system that takes the particulars of your risk picture and spits out a rate. Often he's manually entering the details into the rating system - your name, DOB, SSN, your DL#, the vehicle VINs, etc. The system will spit out an initial rate. This initial rate is always given BEFORE your driving history is run. The reason for this is that the insurance company (and also the agent, if an independent), uses third-party vendors to pull CLUE and MVR reports. It costs them money to run those, so what they usually want the agent to do is inquire about accidents and violations ahead of time, enter those manually into the system, and come to an estimated rate and advise the client that the rate is preliminary and based off the final reports. If the price is in the ballpark for a sale, what is usually required is that the agent take the "next step" in the rating system in order to run the official reports and come to a final rate.
What sometimes happens is that the agent forgets to mention any of this, forgets to run reports, and sells the pre-report rate as the final rate. When the client says "sweet, I'll take it", the agent jumps back into the rating system to finalize the application, and is stopped short by a lovely message that says "you must run reports to continue"! Oh ****, there are a couple accidents here and now my rate is double, time to make excuses. You either man up and admit to the client you screwed up, which I've done a number of times over the years. Or you can start making up stories. "Oh, this one has to go for underwriting review. Woops, they won't accept it."
Now, granted, because I'm in the independent agency system I don't have an inside look at captives like Amica. I have, from afar, seen captives do what I can't do in the independent agency channel. For example, I've lost to Geico (not the dude who used to post here!) a bunch of times when their rate "magically" drops hundreds of dollars to make the sale over my rate. That's a flexibility an independent agent just doesn't have. Take Travelers, for example. I'm essentially plugging in the particulars of your profile - drivers, personal info, DL#s, vehicles and their particulars -- into their rating system, and Travelers is giving me a rate. As long as I've quoted it correctly, and outside of some small ways to affect the rate like quoting 8 days in advance of the effective date for the "early quote discount" etc., I have literally no ability to call Travelers up and ask for a better rate. The rate is based off of your overall insurance score - a proprietary number based on all the factors of your risk picture - the rate is the rate. Another family with an identical risk would have an identical rate. This is unlike commercial insurance, where you can regularly call up an underwriter and negotiate for a lower rate for your client.
