AA European Breakdown Cover ruined our family holiday – part 2

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 2, we are six 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.

Part 1 of what happened is here.

We now have part 2:The wait…

After the AA had said they would organise a taxi for us and accommodation, and that we’d get sms messages to our phone to confirm this, we got ready to wait a bit. We knew it would be a couple of hours, so we were fine. This was about 4pm.

We did get an sms message to my phone to confirm accommodation. An apartment style hotel about 45 minutes away from where we were currently waiting. But no taxi confirmation.

We waited a bit more. Then began the start of the calls to the AA, to find out when and if a taxi was coming.

It takes a long time to get through to the AA, sometimes 15-25 minutes before someone answers. Each time you have to listen to the blurb, make a choice of options and then hold and hope someone answers. When they eventually do, you then have to reexplain what’s going on.

We spoke to someone at about 6pm who said that the French counterpart they work with in France was “organising a taxi” but it was “taking a long time and was difficult”.

They suggested we try and find a taxi. Or call an uber.

Neither of these were an option.

The local taxi company basically told us they were not available. There was one taxi company locally that we’d managed to find via google maps and the internet.

An uber would have cost approximately £300 or more because we needed a big uber or even 2. The garage had made it clear that we couldn’t leave any of our stuff in our car, at all, ie all our luggage etc, and we didn’t particularly want to leave all our luggage in the car anyway so we’d need a large taxi to sort all that out. It was a moot point anyway because there were no Uber options close by and other apps like Bolt didn’t work. We spent time googling to see what we could find but basically we were reliant on the AA rescuing us.

We called them again, and were told we should have a taxi booked for 8pm, and we should get a message confirming that.

No message came. We waited. 8pm came and no taxi.

Then another call to the AA to find out where taxi was. This took waiting on hold again, with both husband and I calling to see who could get through first. This was now 9pm French time.

Parts of the conversation when we got through included

“Are you SURE you didn’t get a confirmation message?”

“Taxi’s are hard to get hold of”

“The French team are very busy”

“It’s only just 8pm, the taxi should be there soon” – we then pointed out that it was actually 9pm in France so the 8pm deadline had passed. (A little disconcerting that they hadn’t got the time difference figured out)

“I’ll call the French team and see what’s going on and get back to you”

“We will call you back”

All the way through the trying to navigate this part of the issue the call handlers attitudes ranged from vaguely sympathetic to basically “I’m being paid minimum wage to do this job and really don’t care” to “let’s blame the French and France, and anyone else, to excuse the fact that we can’t actually provide a service as promised”.

The main theme was blaming the French and the excuse that their French counterparts were either very busy or very thin on the ground staff wise due to it being the holidays. We have subsequently found out that Arc Europe, who provide the French side of the service, not only deal with the AA, but also other major counterparts like RAC, Green Flag as well as local to France breakdown companies. So the AA outsources their services to a company that basically also can’t provide a service and its customers suffer as a result. Whilst I understand this is the system set up, it appears to mean that AA customers are told they will get support but in reality that is thin on the ground at best. 

So we waited for someone to call us back. 9:30pm, 10pm, 11pm. We tried calling the AA again and couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone from 930pm onwards. I was sat on hold to a ring tone constantly. Bear in mind that this service is supposed to be 24/7 and accessible to people having had car or vehicle breakdowns or accidents in a foreign country. They clearly are overwhelmed and don’t have the staff capacity to provide this service.

We had no options, we had no access to a toilet, we were being careful about using up all our water, and we’d had to pee in a grassy field area by the garage. It was chilly and because we didn’t know what was exactly wrong with the car and certain exhaust issues can release fumes into the car, we didn’t feel comfortable running the engine much to warm the car up. We also had to conserve phone batteries.

We, at this point, were coming to the conclusion we were going to have to sleep in the car and potentially try and get hold of the AA in the morning. We knew there was accommodation for us booked but no way to get to it.

The kids were fed up and anxious and very tired and so were the adults.

We kind of bunked down under coats and everyone dozed on and off whilst I attempted to contact the AA every 20 minutes.

Finally at about 1:45am, I got through to someone. I decided to get out of the car to stretch my legs and give it one more try before we gave up and just slept in the car as best we could.

After about 5 minutes someone answered. A female call handler who was incredibly sympathetic and understood our frustrated feelings that at that point we’d been waiting since about 4:30pm and that a taxi promised had not arrived and that no one had called back as promised. She looked at the system and realised the taxi had been cancelled. No reason given. “Were you sorting your own taxi?”

Me “no, I spoke to someone at about 9pm and said we couldn’t and that the AA needed to”

At this point I asked her “Am I now going to tell my family we are sleeping in the car, in the middle of nowhere, in France, with no toilet and no access to any more water?”

She apologised further and said she would try and find a taxi to come and collect us. I do accept that it was slightly more complicated because we needed a bigger taxi for all our stuff but she said she would see what she could do and that it wasn’t ok that we were still waiting. She said she would call us back. At this particular moment I didn’t believe anything anyone from the AA was telling me, but we weren’t going anywhere, were we?

Another wait. About half an our later, she did call us back and said that a large taxi had been booked for us and would arrive within an hour.

It was approximately an hour out or just over that, when to our surprise and delight, a taxi did arrive. A larger people carrier type vehicle, its driver had clearly got out of bed to answer this booking but he spoke a little English and was so kind and helpful. We piled in the car with all our stuff and a 45 minute drive later we arrived at our accommodation. This was now about 4am in the morning. 12 hours after we had arrived at the garage after being towed. We got into our accommodation having left our car randomly sitting in the driveway of a car garage in a little town half an hour from Calais. We had no idea what the next day or two would look like. But at least we could get some sleep and face that in a few hours…

At no point in this experience did we feel supported by the AA or any kind of sense of urgency, or concern. Stuck in France, in the middle of nowwhere, in the middle of the night, with a broken down car, didn’t seem to be much of an issue of concern for them. Their responses from start to finish mainly caused us more stress and anxiety as we faced costs, a car that couldn’t be driven, and a holiday going not the way we expected.

The AA European Breakdown cover quotes on their site “We’ll cover you from the moment you leave home, to the moment you get back – whether you’re driving in France, Ireland or up to 44 countries across the continent.” If they way they treated us when we dealt with them, is their idea of customer service and cover, then clearly they run at a very very low standard of care.

Part 3 and the attempt to get a hire car, find out what was going to happen to our car, and trying to actually start our holiday, is next…