Ante-room of Avarice: Adventures with Esure
[note: this posting prompted a response below from Esure, please read in context]
Motor insurance, eh? I made the mistake of ringing Esure today to let them know that I’d be having a courtesy car for the day while mine was in for servicing. For my pains, I earned 15 to 20 minutes on the phone (mostly on hold) while they passed me around. They put me through to the claims department at one point … “what was the date and time of the accident?”. Finally, they asked me for £26 to insure the courtesy car for the day!
I asked them how that squared with the wording on my insurance certificate which clearly states that I am already covered under the policy: “the policyholder may also drive with the owner’s permission a motor car that they do not own and that is not hired or leased to them under a hire purchase or leasing arrangement”. They didn’t seem to think that they were under any obligation to respect such irrelevancies as the terms of our contract. That doesn’t fill me with any confidence about how they would behave if I ever needed to claim on the policy. Presumably, if I hadn’t bothered to call them as a courtesy and had had an accident, they would have then rejected the claim on the grounds that I wasn’t covered. Useful to know!
All credit to the team at Lexus Stoke who not only resisted the doubtless powerful urge to say as if to camera “calm down, dear, it’s only a breach of contract”, but who also kindly put the car on their own insurance at no charge to make up for the inconvenience caused by esure.
So, hoorah to Lexus and a great big raspberry to Esure. I’m sure they don’t care, but hell will freeze over before I insure through them again. Here are more reviews of Esure – some unhappy customers there.
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Working on right now: Online marketing for a client selling brick-effect wallpaper
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Hello Kevin
It’s Adrian Webb here from esure. I thought it worth a quick follow-up so you can understand what may have transpired in your call.
Courtesy cars are fleet cars, run by garages. In about 50% of cases, such cars are on a fleet policy with that garage. If it was within Lex’s power to put it on their fleet policy that day, one must assume it was on that ‘service fleet’ policy anyway. It would be most unusual for them to have a car NOT on a policy then to have to add it in these circumstances. You may want to take it up with them and perhaps if it was anyway, they should have told you.
Anyway, you were given you the impression that you had to arrange your own cover so you called us to arrange cover for a different additional car for one day. Our price would have been for fully comprehensive cover. That covers you if you damage the car as well as if you damage any third party. £26 might sound expensive but car insurance policies are annual contracts and priced that way.
Try getting cover elsewhere for a car for one day and it is usually very expensive. Why? Because if you crash on that day injuring one or more third parties, the claims cost is just as high as it is for an annual policyholder and the amount of underwriting, admin, policy documentation, Motor Insurers Database logging and everything else involved is exactly the same for one day as it is for 365 days.
Anyway, back to your point. Virtually all motor insurance policies in the land include what’s called DOC cover – driving other cars. Such cover does only one thing: it protects the third parties you might run into. It offers nothing whatsoever in relation to the car your driving. It is the minimum statutory level of cover allowed in the EU. So, if you slide on oil and hit a tree, you pay for all damage to the car. If the car is stolen, you pay. If the car catches fire, you pay. If you have an accident with another car, you pay for the damage to the car you’re driving.
If your courtesy car was a Lexus and you were unfortunate enough to have a cat run out in front of you, swerve and write it off, you would need to have £15,000 plus of spare cash to cover the damage or replacement.
Often young people believe they can insure a Mini then drive a Ferrari on DOC cover. What prevents this is (hopefully) the fact they couldn’t afford the damage if they crashed.
So while you clearly feel we were breaching your contract, the truth is perhaps that your assumption that you were ‘covered’ may have been based on a misunderstanding of exactly what would have been covered and what the consequences would have been after a claim. The third party would indeed have got their due… but everything else would have been down to you.
I hope this helps,
Adrian
Head of Corporate Communications, esure
My thanks to Adrian of Esure for taking the time to make his reasoned response and explanation.
I accept his argument that the charge is there because the cover for alternative vehicles would normally be 3rd-party only, and comprehensive cover would be sensible in such situations. It doesn’t say that on the insurance certificate, and none of the Esure staff I spoke with bothered to mention or explain. But, I am sure that it will be there in the policy schedule. So, I am happy to withdraw the suggestion of breach of contract!
I’m less convinced about the argument for a £26 charge for 8 hour’s insurance. This sounds more like the special pleading of the big banks trying to justify their bank charges on grounds of operational cost. If I can rent a car (with insurance) for that price or less for 24 hours from any of the rental companies, then I’m sure that a specialist insurer like Esure can extend the cover on a vehicle for 8 hours from 3rd party to comprehensive on an existing policy at a transaction cost of pennies. That they choose to levy a £26 fee looks more like a case of milking existing customers.
Under the circumstances, I am pleased to downgrade Esure from the Hall of Shame to the Ante-room of Avarice.
With my work head on, this discussion raises some very interesting issues that I’ll blog about over at Kent House. I posted a negative experience on this personal blog at 10.32. By 12.20 (less than 2 hours later), Esure had found the article and the Head of Corporate Communications had responded. That illustrates how businesses are taking online reputation and social media very seriously nowadays, something that we talk about a lot at Kent House.
Shame the same response can;t be found at Sheilas Wheels , a part of esure. I’m 3 weeks in and still waiting for my policy to be cancelled. Tried calling 3x and calls dropped every time, they never call back, tried calling back after latest call to get answerphone saying office was closed.
Numerous emails, they have the info they need, they’ve had it more than once, after 18 minutes the guy I was talking to had still not cancel my policy. They are just trying to keep it going and then charge me extra weeks for still having at, and they want a cancellation fee now, no mention of that before.
They have no social media presence whatsoever, maybe because they have too many unhappy customers?
Apologies for hijacking your blog, they don’t have any of their own I can contact them on…..