To anyone considering taking out a policy with AA Insurance, or moving your business to this outfit, I strongly recommend you read this string of debacles I endured with the insurer, and its related (although they seem to claim not to be) entity, AA Road Service.
Here they are. Read them and weep. In reverse chronological order:
This one. And
this one. And
this one. And . . . yes, wait, there's more . . .
this one.
And as if that's not enough to put off even the hardiest of policy holders, there's the string of unrelated unhappy experiences prior to that . . . read about them
here and
here.
It's not often that my tenacity is exhausted, but - in the case of the AA - they've managed it.
A concluding email from them
(they stopped becoming a priority in my world and my coverage some weeks ago; it amounted to throwing good time after bad), didn't specifically say so, but seemed to indicate that:
- They no longer required me to sign a legal agreement "limiting my expectations" before I could have a direct conversation with a customer complaints person;
- Their acknowledgement of the fact that my claim didn't "go smoothly" was limited to the glass replacement guy leaving my gate open and that they'd dealt with him (actually I dealt with him, and that issue was utterly dwarfed by the debacle that was directly administered upon me by the AA itself, not the frigging glass guy;
- They have an internal menu of readily available, template lies to pull out when handling a claim. In this instance, they obviously didn't even read the notes or my previous correspondence or accounts of my phone calls, since the one they pulled out the bag didn't actually make any sense at all:
"We cannot provide cover for the window regulator (as this failed due to wear and tear)," they wrote.
If they weren't such scoundrels - giving the insurance industry at large the bad name that some insurers have tried for decades to shake off - it would be funny.
Why? Because the window regulator didn't fail. The window regulator was never part of my claim. Maybe they meant to tick the option above or below from their standard "pull a reason out of our ass" list of claim refusal "reasons".
Gives you a window (pardon the pun) into their standard modus operandi at the AA, doesn't it?
Another Furious AA Customer Asks
The Customer to Take Up Their Case
Meantime, a couple of weeks back, I received a submission through the Contact form on
The Customer.
A widow from Upper Hutt had been left vehicle-less
(for several weeks at the point of reaching out to me) by AA Road Service.
My understanding of the matter is that two years prior to her recently experiencing a flat battery, an AA Road Service mechanic had installed an incorrect battery - which should have lasted a lot longer than it did, and was still under warranty with the AA when it failed.
For reasons that I'll leave between the AA and their stranded-without-a-vehicle policyholder widow, the AA - she says - had ignored her numerous calls regarding the matter and her vehicle lay undrivable at her property.
I do hope she manages to get them to take the appropriate action and get her back on the road. After all, she'd been an AA Road Service member since the 1990s. I was going to give it a crack on her behalf, but some way into the call with her, I realised that I just didn't have the appetite to suddenly become an unpaid advocate for what might be a whole lot more disgruntled AA policy holders out there around New Zealand. For sure, it almost became a full-time job trying to deal with the various disjointed entities of the Automobile Association, on my own behalf.
Bloody hell. What a joke. Except it's not. Because if you're the one trying to deal with this lot, it's far from funny.
