The true cost of travel test packages

The UK government gets into the COVID test price comparison game

The government maintains a list of testing providers on the gov.uk site. Transport Minister Grant Shapps has started quoting figures from it when challenged about the high cost of testing. He said last week in Parliament that the lowest price that he had seen available there was £4.95. He did acknowledge that this was a specific deal and that “costs are higher than that“, but he still used the figure for effect and said that we should “recognise that they [testing prices] are no longer the hundreds of pounds quoted in the spring”.

I hadn’t previously been aware that the government was running a COVID test price comparison site. So I went and took a look at what it shows.

Overall distribution of prices

When you go to the government site and ask for a list of test providers without filtering by region or test type, you get a list of 396 companies. By the way, the site says there are 397, but they obviously can’t count. I know because I brought the list into Python so I could analyse it.

Here is a histogram of the prices shown on the government site. For the statisticians, the median price is £174 and the mean is £173. The most common price was £210. You might think that some of these prices are for multi-test packages, but every one I checked was for a single test. As we will see in a minute, the other problem is that these prices are listed as “prices from” and you know what that means about the real prices.

Despite what Grant Shapps says, most of the providers listed on his own site are still charging “hundreds of pounds”. But it is true there are some cheaper prices apparently on offer. Nothing as low as £4.95, but we do have prices “from £25”. (A quick aside: since I did this analysis, a £20 option has popped up on the site. But clicking through to the supplier shows that their PCR test packages are all “Temporarily Out of Stock”).

How real are these lead-in prices?

On-site options are the cheapest

The first couple of providers showing a £25 price are both are for a single PCR test and are listed as being of type “Provider supervised on site”. That means that you have to go in person to a specific location to get your test done. One is in Chester, which is unlikely to be very useful for many people. However, the second, Confirm-Testing, uses London Heathrow Marriott Hotel as its testing location. That might actually work well for quite a lot of people, especially if flying into Heathrow. That company also offers a day 2&8 on-site bundle for £35. You have to go in person to the Marriott for both tests, but these are good prices. Their home-based testing is not so competitive, at £59 for Day 2 only and £119 for Day 2&8. I am rather suspicious about the gap between these prices. My guess is that they are using the very competitive on-site options to draw traffic to their site and treating it as a marketing investment. If so, the number of appointments that are actually available at the Marriott may be so limited as to be useless in practice.

What about “self-swab at home” tests?

Most people will prefer to go with a test that can be done at home. The government’s site let’s you filter to look just at those. I selected “self-swab at home”.

The cheapest listed price is again £25, this time from Nomad Travel. But clicking through to their website reveals that once again this is another on-site only option, although they do at least have six locations around the country. The cheapest at home option they offer is £55 for a single test or a day 2&8 package for £99. So the listing on the government’s page showing at home tests from £25 is just false advertising. Otherwise known as a lie.

The next cheapest is £26 from 123tests.co.uk. This is technically a “self-swab at home” test, but you need to collect it yourself, from a single location in East Sussex in order to get that price. If you want to get it delivered, a single test will cost you £75, two will cost you double at £150. Shipping obviously doesn’t cost them £49, so this is just a ruse to game the government’s web site.

Third on the list is £28 from Expert Medicals. That is the first entry for a home test where the advertised price is almost available. There is an £8 shipping fee on top, so it is really £36 for a single test. For the day 2&8 package, the price is £70, or £78 including shipping. Of course, it is nonsense that the second test should cost 50% more than the first. I don’t think you can even buy two single tests when returning from an amber country, because the government requires you to pre-purchase a “day 2&8 package”. Expert Medicals are obviously working on the basis that there aren’t really any routes on the green list. So this is a relatively cheap way of buying their way to the top of the government’s list, which by default is sorted by the “prices from” column.

Next on the list is £30 from “0044 COVID Test”. The name is obviously trying to get to the top of the list when sorted alphabetically. That matters more than you might think because even when sorted by price, the name is used as the secondary sorting criterion. So where prices are the same, you end up first on the list. However, in their desire to get to the front of the alphabet, they have been outdone by “000 Book A Travel Test”, “0000Covid 19 private test Ltd”, “001 Covid Test” and “004 Medical Testing”. Anyway, £30 gets you a single PCR test, and this time the day 2&8 package is more logically priced at £60. This seemed promising but then I noticed the small print that “shipping is calculated at checkout”. The cheapest shipping option proved to be £35.45, so the real cost of a single test is actually £65 and a day 2&8 package would be £95.

At this point, I should apologise to any Robert Bayles out there who have a btinternet email address. You may be getting some spam. On many of these sites you have to get virtually all the way through the ordering process, often needing to enter a massive amount of personal information, before the shipping costs are even revealed. As we have seen, those can radically increase the cost.

Next on the list is Abicare Health, listing tests “from £35”. Going to their site, the cheapest price on offer was £45 and this was for a test that needed to be collected in person. The postal version was £70 for a single test, or £128 for a day 2&8 package. So, another piece of false advertising.

Next up is LabMedExpert for £39. You can’t see or do anything on their website without creating an account first and even after doing that, all you can do is to fill in all your personal and travels details and “send a request”, still without seeing any pricing information.

1010 Labs is next with prices from £39.99. A truly ghastly quantity of information needed to be entered, often several times, before finding out that there was £9.99 of shipping costs to be added, bringing the total to £49.98. The day 2&8 package was £99.99, or £110 after shipping (assuming shipping is the same - I couldn’t face going through the process again). Once again, the second test costs 50% more than the first.

Next on the list is Nationwide Pathology Limited, with tests from £40. The website is pretty clunky, but it did appear that a single test could be bought for £40 without additional fees. As usual, the day 2&8 package was more than twice the price at £111. A 78% markup for the second test this time.

So, the lowest cost for a single self-swab at home test including shipping that I found was £36, but £55-£75 is more typical even for the “cheap” tests. A day 2&8 package starts from £78, but £100 or more is a better guide. Whether I would actually use the lowest price suppliers here is another thing of course. None of them filled me with any confidence.

Should anyone use the government’s site?

I have to say that the experience of starting from the government’s website and trying to find a test provider that meets your needs and offers good value is not something I could recommend to anyone.

Even though the government’s site asks you whether you are looking for green list or amber list packages before showing the list of suppliers, the prices shown are all for single tests, even if you’ve told them you are looking for amber list packages. Under the heading “What is included in the price”, the site says that it “includes delivery”, which it clearly doesn’t for many of the providers that I checked.

The cheapest providers on the list seem to be strangely named companies with crap web-sites, misleading pricing strategies and consumer hostile policies designed to draw you in with a low headline price and then sting you with shipping charges and the like. There are also plenty of companies offering tests at rip-off prices, like “The Mayfair GP”, with prices “starting at £399”.

Whilst I do think it is great that the government has tried to offer a service for travellers trying to find testing solutions, if their site was run by a private enterprise, the advertising standards and consumer protection bodies would already have shut it down as being grossly misleading. In my opinion, it is not a good starting place for consumers looking to find a good deal.

In truth, virtually all of the companies listed on the government’s site are resellers of testing services from a handful of large testing companies. Let’s take a look at the market from the other end of the telescope.

The big laboratory suppliers

You’ll be reassured to know that the actual testing services are provided by certified labs and there are many fewer of them. The government site does list the labs that each reseller is using, albeit with quite a lot of misspellings and typos. Anyway, I cleaned up and analysed the data and here are the biggest of them, based on the number of resellers.

Whilst Oncologica tops the chart by total number of resellers, more of theirs are non-exclusive compared to Randox. Randox claims to be the UK’s largest COVID-10 testing provider and it seems likely that is a truthful claim.

Randox offers home test packages direct to end customers, with single tests priced at £48. The other two- and three-test packages are a simple multiple based on the number of tests. There didn’t seem to be any hidden extras that I could find. They have 10% off deals with the main airlines and tour operators to offer green and amber packages at £43 and £86 respectively, with a simple coupon code. Some airlines provide discount codes for other suppliers too, but all the ones I checked include Randox and it is the cheapest option in every case.

Oncologica don’t seem to want to be listed in their own right on the government’s site. They do sell kits direct to the public, priced at £55 for a single test. The two-test package at £105 gets you a small discount for the second test, as does the three-test deal of £158. But that is still 10% more expensive than the Randox deal, even before the travel discount. I assume they let their resellers do the discounting.

None of the next three big labs sell direct to the public.

Boots

Given the hassle and stress involved in organising testing and the confusing pricing practices of some online sellers, it would be no surprise if consumers turned to brands that they trust. Boots is the 10 tonne gorilla in High Street pharmacy these days. What do they have to offer?

As you might expect from a big brand like Boots, they set out their pricing and product range as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, given the inherent complexities of the rules. I’ve shown the infographic from their website below. The big downside is the price - a single Day-2 test is £99 and the Day 2&8 package is £160.

Boots are actually reselling a testing service from Source BioScience. We saw them earlier as one of the middle-sized lab suppliers. Source BioScience sell what I assume are the same testing packages direct to consumer, with a day 2 test at £60 and day 2&8 package at £120. These are already relatively expensive, but Boots have marked them up by a further £40.

Whatever the appeals of a trusted brand like Boots, if you go that route you’ll be paying a massive markup for the privilege, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

So what does this all mean?

I embarked on this piece of research to answer the question of what cost consumers are having to bear due to the onerous testing requirements from the current set of travel restrictions. My conclusion is that the basic price of a travel PCR test is £43 at the moment. That is available direct from the leading test provider, with a freely available travel discount code. If you don’t shop around, you can easily pay double that. It may be possible to get a test done on-site for as little as £25, if you look hard, the location suits you and you manage to secure an appointment.

The whole system is about to be reviewed and one of the biggest remaining barriers to travel getting back to normal is the cost of testing. During the last week of June, 245,513 arrival PCR tests were conducted in England. At £43 per test, that’s a cost to travellers of £10.6m per week. It could be quite a bit higher if people are not shopping around. You need to add the cost of the pre-departure test too, which would be another £5m or so. On top of that is the cost of any testing required by other countries on the outbound journey. From July 19, people who have been fully vaccinated in the UK will be able to avoid one of the two arrivals tests, but volume increases will likely more than offset this in terms of the overall costs being shouldered by consumers.

Grant Shapps has been downplaying the cost of testing, claiming that competition from testing providers is driving down prices. Given what we have seen about the real world cost of tests, his reference to £4.95 tests in his statement to Parliament shows that he is either totally divorced from reality, or deliberately trying to mislead. Or both.

As we have seen, the 396 suppliers listed on the government’s site provides an illusion of choice and competition. In reality, a handful of private sector labs are doing the actual testing and dictating the pricing. For the most part, the only competition that is going on is for which reseller can conjure up the cleverest way to present a low headline price and get themselves to the top of the “low price” ranking on the government site. Meanwhile, deceiving customers about what the actual cost of the test will be by the time they’ve completed their purchase.

Apparently, their tactics work on government ministers too.