AA European Breakdown Cover ruined our family holiday – part 3

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 3 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.

You can read part 1 and part 2 before you read on here.

We arrived at our hotel, after our long wait in the carpark outside the garage. We had two apartment style room spaces and we all collapsed into bed, at about 4:30am and slept for about 5 or so hours. The accommodation was nice, clean and the staff had been very helpful when I had let them know we were going to be very late arriving. We were staying in a town called Saint Omer, not that far from Calais.

We woke up, feeling a bit shell shocked by the happenings of the night before, and the kids and husband went to get some food supplies. We then attempted to call the AA, again, to find out what was next.

One of the themes of this experience and the service (not) provided was the lack of sympathy or even consistency in the communication we got from the call handlers at the AA. Some staff were vaguely helpful and some were downright, as horrible as it sounds useless. They didn’t reassure us, or make us feel like there was any kind of plan to be had.

We knew because it was France, and also a weekend that the likelihood of getting a hire car on a Sunday, or any kind of action on our broken down car, was slim, but we did try ourselves to look for car hire and didn’t have a lot of luck. The AA were VERY very keen to remind us of the constraints on our insurance policy and how much we were allocated budget wise and that made us feel under even more pressure. We understand the constraints, but being in a random town, unplanned with our car effectively abandoned 45 minutes away, having spent 11 hours stuck in our car the previous day and night and no ability to attempt to get on with our holiday, it was incredibly frustrating to be dealing with customer service personnel who didn’t understand how the French system worked and who didn’t seem at all concerned or at least pretending to show any vague empathy to people stuck unexpectedly in circumstances beyond their control, didn’t help. Again, getting through to them was also hard, with them supposedly running a 24/7 service but long waits to get through. They also fail to call back when they said they would, and we would be promised a call back but then it wouldn’t happen and we would have to call them again, explain what was going on, to yet another person, to try and get information or answers. Finally we spoke to someone who had a vague sense of empathy and common sense who agreed with us that getting a hire car on a Sunday and that they would process a payment to the hotel to allow us to stay another night, and that we should just try and relax and rest and make contact with the AA on the Monday morning. They all claimed to be contacting their European counterparts who were supposed to be organising things for them, like the taxi that failed to arrive (I actually got an email on the Sunday morning telling us the taxi had been cancelled, better late than never, I guess?) but kept claiming things were “slow” or ‘busy” which we understood to a certain point but given that the AA claims on their site “Our cover ensures driving in Europe is never a worry – if your vehicle breaks down, our network of over 60,000 third-party local repairers and recovery operators are ready to help. And working in 44 countries across Europe, you can be assured that you’ll get help from someone who knows the region you’re in best” but can’t seem to actually put that into practice and lets people like us down, badly.

We decided to make the most of the accommodation, and also to explore the area, which was very pretty and scenic, and we also spoke to our holiday host in Normandy (Rosie and Simon were incredibly helpful and kind all the way through this fiasco, whilst we cannot recommend AA European breakdown cover, we can recommend Eco Gites of Lenault to stay at, if you fancy visiting Normandy) to let them know what was happening because obviously we were not going to be arriving there any time soon.

We spent the rest of the day trying to de stress a bit and to be positive that we would get a hire car sorted and that the AA would actually kick into action properly once the weekend was over and manage the repair of our car. We were hoping this was a bit of a blip and our holiday would get started properly soon…At least we were in the land where supermarkets have whole aisles of chocolate…

It did, sort of, but it wasn’t smooth and we can safely say that the AA did not handle things well.

Come back for part 4 and the car hire fiasco day and the start of our car not being looked at or repaired in good time for us to go home…