AA European Breakdown Cover ruined our family holiday – part 1

This is a multiple part story, as we raise a complaint with both the AA European Breakdown cover, and escalate our complaint to the Financial Ombudsmen. At the time of writing this part 1, we are five weeks into the eight week “complaint” process time with the AA, and they have currently not allocated our complaint to someone to review. After eight weeks they either have to have addressed our complaint, or we can escalate our complaint. We had AA European breakdown cover which we assumed would mean that if our car had an accident or broke down that we would be safe, supported and helped to manage the situation. That was not the case for us, and a brief stint on the internet and social media tells me we are not alone…

Summary:

• Our car broke down in France, just a few miles outside of Calais, on the first day of our holiday and travelling to our destination. This was a Saturday.
• The AA organised the towing of our car to a garage and then was supposed to organise a taxi to accommodation they had organised for us. We actually sat in the garage car park for 11 hours waiting for the taxi that never arrived. We eventually got to the accommodation organised for us at 4am the next morning, having been left for those 11 hours with no access to water, a toilet, and very little communication from the AA and difficulty getting through to them to find out what was going on.
• We spent two days and two nights in a hotel, whilst the AA were supposed to organise car hire for us.
• We arrived at our planned destination on the Tuesday early morning, almost 3 days since our arrival in France.
• The AA then left our car in the garage she was towed to for the whole of the first week until we took the initiative and nudged the garage and the AA to attempt to diagnose and repair her. She finally went into a garage to be looked at on the following Tuesday, ten days after she broke down. On the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, as we were preparing to leave our holiday, we were told she wasn’t fully repaired and could only be driven slowly, and they couldn’t tell us exactly what was wrong with her, or how safe she was to drive and what would happen if she broke down again whilst we attempted to get home in her
• We challenged the AA about this, and they agreed to, finally, repatriate the car for us
• We then booked tickets to travel home differently from our original plan and came home
• The car was repatriated to us and is now back with us but we have to organise for her to be re looked at more repairs completed if possible
• The communication about the repatriation process from the AA team has been vague at best, and non existent or poor at worst.
• We spent most days of our holiday chasing the AA to get the car looked at and a plan for how we would get home. We only were able to finalise those plans on the Thursday before we left to go home on the Saturday.
• We have unplanned expenses as a result of this breakdown and what was supposed to be a relaxing family holiday ended up being stressful, expensive and badly impacted by the AA not offering the services it claims to offer, poor communication, miscommunication on different things, lack of empathy, complete disorganisation, shifting blame to both us and service providers in France, and a complete inability to provide the service they claim to offer.

 

Day 1. The breakdown.

We have left Calais, having come off the Eurotunnel. We are on the motorway and as we attempt to overtake a car, we hear a bang, at the back of our car and the engine appears to be struggling.

We pull over to the hard shoulder and carry out the emergency process French law requires, yellow triangle, hazard lights etc.

We call the AA European breakdown cover number. They inform us we must call the French police and get them to help us get off the motorway. We attempt that. The French police line was unhelpful and hung up on us.

A random tow truck appears and offers to tow the car. We don’t know who they are and they speak no English, but we suspect they are a company who drive the motorways and spot breakdowns and offer their services for a hefty fee. We managed to explain that we can’t take the offer of a tow as our insurance company has said we need to call the police. He offers to look at the back of the car, and both he and we agree that it’s likely that the exhaust has blown and that we can drive her off the motorway slowly. He offers to guide us, and he drives in front of us so we can slowly exit the motorway. He drives off but we are safely off the motorway and now we have to call the AA again.

We call the AA, they pin our location via my phone (side note, please make sure that you have the ability to call certain premium numbers within your mobile phone plan, when abroad, we realised we couldn’t call ll the AA via Smarty which we use for our phones, but my work phone number could call their number)

They then say they will call us a tow to take the car to a garage. But as it’s almost lunchtime in France and we know that most places close over lunch, we don’t expect that to happen for an hour or so at least. They are also busy. We are fine, we know we just have to wait.

So, we wait. We have some food and water, and we are ok.

No tow truck arrives. We then call the AA again and they inform us that we ACTUALLY not off the motorway enough (we are in a country lane, with a layby and nowhere near the motorway, but the tow truck won’t come out to us yet as we are too close to the motorway still) We discuss what we can do and because we technically still can drive the car, slowly, we diced to drive about 5 minutes down the road to where we can see a campsite and small town. We agree to do this and call the AA back.

The car is slow and noisy and we are all holding our breath but we drive to the campsite and park. The noise makes us obvious but we made it.

We then call the AA again, and they say the tow company is fine to collect the car from there and we now need to wait. It could be 2-3 hours at least.

The campsite lets us use their toilets and we settle down to wait. We are all a bit tired and anxious by now but we are hopeful we will get towed and the AA will take it from there.

A garage truck arrives but it’s. not big enough to tow the car. Miscommunication 1. They think they are doing a roadside repair. We know the exhaust has probably gone and that isn’t going to work. He looks at the underneath of the car and agrees with us, and calls his company, who send out another tow truck. They arrive quite fast and load the car onto their truck and us into their cabin and we drive to their garage area about 15 minutes away.

We then call the AA and ask “what next?”. They tell us they will organise accommodation for us and a taxi to that accommodation. However they tell us it could take a couple of hours to organise so we need to wait with the car. We understand this, and know that it is holiday season in France and we are prepared to wait a few hours. The car garage employees acknowledge we have to wait and say we can wait on outside in the driveway and leave the keys in their lock box when we do get collected by taxi. They leave. They do allow us to use their toilets and fill up our water bottles.

And we settle down to wait, assuming that as it is now almost 5pm, that in a couple of hours a taxi will be organised and we will at least be in a hotel overnight and would then work out what to do next. We are told to wait for SMS messages confirming accommodation and a taxi.

We are in a driveway to the garage/tow company, in a small village, with nothing local to us amenity wise, but we figure it’s a couple of hours, we will be ok.

And we begin to wait…

Come back for Part 2- the wait, the many calls, the many not being able to get through call attempts, hang ups, negations and almost sleeping in our car overnight.