Aviva introduce £200 excess if you want to use your own choice of repairer.

Quentin

Sally_A wrote: »

....Unless all bodyshops get together and effectively go on strike, insurers will not review their procedures.

Policyholders should be made aware they have the right to choose their own repairer.

Then it's up to the policyholder to insist!

The insurers are guilty of blackmailing us into using their repairers (telling us we must go there/can't have a courtesy car (when we can get one from our own garage amyway)/charging more excess when we exercise our right).

The Aviva Rep's assurance to us earlier in the thread that Aviva are committed to "treating customers fairly" and had taken this into account before introducing this extra excess, and that she would find out more on this and post further turned out to be spin, as she never returned to explain how Aviva were applying "TCF" when ontriducing this punitive excess on customers wanting to exercise their right!

olly300

Quentin wrote: »

Policyholders should be made aware they have the right to choose their own repairer.

Then it's up to the policyholder to insist!

The insurers are guilty of blackmailing us into using their repairers (telling us we must go there/can't have a courtesy car (when we can get one from our own garage amyway)/charging more excess when we exercise our right).

If it's clearly a non-fault accident, you have the other parties details, you aren't squeezed for cash and have the time then you can choose to do what you like otherwise you are stuck.

The year I had two non-fault car accidents with the first one I got the garage I wanted to do the repair which took 1 day and needed no courtesy car.

With the second one because I needed a courtesy car and had no time to organise things myself I had felt I had to use the insurer's body shop.

However as the insurer's staff were deliberately unhelpful with the second incident and rude about the skills of the garage who repaired my car the first time round when they hadn't seen my car at all plus the insurer deliberately obstructed the work of their own body-shop to increase costs to the other party I won't be using them as an insurer any more.

Funnily enough they still come out as one of the lowest quotes for me but I prefer to pay £20 more a year to escape them.