Insurance claim for my LCD tv.

rolleypolleypud

Ok I don't know if I'm just being tight but here's the story......

Last week during half term my 7 year old son was playing baseball on the wii which was connected to our 40" lcd tv.
He was wearing the wrist strap but he hadn't done it up like he has been told to do a million times:mad: Anyway you can guess what happens he swings for the ball lets go of the controller and smack it hits the tv screen in the bottom left hand corner.
The outer screen is not cracked but when it's switched on you can see what resembles a crack underneth the screen and the rest of the screen is just black with blue lines. It won't pick up any picture on a channel and won't play any sound.

I am covered for accidental damage on my home insurance and have never ever made a claim before. I called the co-operative insurance who my home cover is with as soon as it happened and they passed my details over to their claims department.

They called at the end of last week and said they were not sending anybody round to look at the tv but someone would call beginning of this week to do a over the phone interview about what happened. They called on Wednesday and spoke to me asking me the same questions over and over again which I answered. In the end the woman said she was now going to type up the report and send it to us but we now had to take the tv to an independant tv repairer so they could do a report into weather the telly is fixable and how much this would cost and weather it would be cost affective to scrap it and start over with a similar model. We have rang around to get some quotes and the cheapest for a full letterheaded report is £50 co-operative have said this will not be reemburst. We have two week to get this done and for them to recieve the report or our claim will be thrown out.

Now like I said maybe I am being tight but I thought the whole point of having insurance was so we weren't out of pocket should an accident happen. I have never made a claim through any insurance before so this may be the way it is normally done?

Do insurance companys normally make people pay for reports or should they foot the cost because this is what we pay our premiums for?

mambo69

why should they pay for the report initially? just stop your sons pocket money until the money is recovered, maybe next time he will do as he is told.

I do agree though that if the report says scrap and replace and they do then you should be reimbursed

huckster

rolleypolleypud wrote: »

Do insurance companys normally make people pay for reports or should they foot the cost because this is what we pay our premiums for?

Yes it is quite common for policyholders to pay for the own reports to establish the extent of the damage and whether it can be repaired or needs to be replaced. This is because you have an excess on the policy and if it turned out a repair could be achieved at a certain level, you may not be able to claim or not wish to claim.

Just follow the process. At the moment Insurers are really suffering from fraudulent claims, so will conduct telephone interviews to check claims and require reports etc. Gone are the days when you can phone an Insurer and get a replacement within a week without any hassle.