AA European Breakdown Cover ruined our family holiday – part 4

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 4, the AA have ackhnowledged our complaint and admitted some fault but we are not satisfied with the outcome of their response to us so we are taking our complaint to the financial ombudsmen. The only reason we got a response before the eight week deadline was becasue I was able to make contact with someone that isn’t the generic customer services system. A glance at social media shows people still dealing with the appalling lack of care, joined up thinking, follow up, or even basic actions on the part of the AA and the services they claim to provide via their social media and website are not what actually happens in real life.

You can read part 1, 2 and 3 before this part 4

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.
• We now take our complaint to the Ombudsman

We left of in part 3 with us taking a breath and trying to make the best of a Sunday in a place we hadn’t expected to be, not at our holiday destination, whilst trying not to worry too much about our car. On the Monday morning, we got up, hoping to make contact with the AA, have them organise a hire car for us, and start to make a plan to get our car sorted.

The usual long time to get through to customer services started but eventually we did get through, Yet another frustrating series of conversations where they blamed the local French team for how long it might take to get us a hire car, no plan for our car to be looked at and potentially repaired and being told someone would call us back once they had logged yet another check in with the French team. They told us that there was going to be difficulty getting the French team to act in any kind of timely manner and that car hire might be diffiuclt. We in fact, went online and found local to us car hire, that was available but apparently that was not within the capability of the French team working for the AA. At one point we were told that if they couldn’t find us a hire car that day, that we would have to go home. When I asked them how we would get home, with all of our bags and no car, they were not really able to tell us the answer. They were very keen to remind us of the financial limits of the policy but not actually to do much in terms of help us.

We did have one conversation with a customer service representative who told us that our car would be taken to a garage in a town near to where she was towed, Marquis, to be looked at. He seemed to think that would be happening but couldn’t say when.

We were literally about to give up and try and hire a car for ourselves, (and then probably have to fight the AA to claim that cost back) when we got an sms from the French services side saying a car had been hired for us. BUT, because no one had really listened to us, it looked pretty small. Our own car is small but we travelled with a roof box so had a fair amount of baggage. Again, another worry. We had had to take all our bags with us when we left our car in the garage, so how on earth would we manage them in a small car with no roof box? Also the car hire was in Lille, almost an hour and a half away from where we were. The AA don’t help you figure out how to get there. They told us they could pay for a taxi but it might take a long time to order one. Again, we looked and Uber was not an option and local taxi companies were not really helpful. Fortunately, Lille was a train ride away so the husband route marched to the station, got on a train and eventually managed to get to Lille to the car hire place. The car hire place, were incredibly kind and they upgraded our car hire to a larger car. So that was definitely a ray of light on what had otherwise been yet another stressful day. He drove the hire car back to the hotel, where I had had to negotiate and pay for the hotel to let us stay in our room later than checkout. Again, they were also very kind.

He arrived back, we packed the hire car and on the road to Normandy we went. Further away from our broken down car, and no futher forward in how things would be resolved. We got to our holiday destination, at about half past midnight on the Tuesday morning.

Would we be able to relax? Would our car get sorted? That’s part 5. (clue, no, and not really)