Don't Insure Your Mobile Through Your Bank Account

twistedmoosie

Hi everyone,

As a keen MSE'er I have hunted through the forums, and there doesn't seem to be much about the mobile phone insurance policies that various banks are offering.

Generally the advice I have had from others is that it's a money-saving tip to get your bank account upgraded (in my case to Natwest Advantage Gold) and save money by getting mobile phone insurance, travel insurance, and roadside assistance for £13.

I'm posting to tell you all that if you end up making a claim, there's nothing money saving about it.

My example is Natwest. It took the insurance company 1 week to send me the forms; a further 3 working days to upload them on their system; and at this point a 10 day working period has been added on for them to consider it. So over two weeks later, and still no sign they are considering my claim, let alone making a decision, and I still don't have a phone. During this time I'm obviously paying my mobile provider for a service I cannot use, unless I buy a further 'temporary phone' - add that to the excess (£25) and you've got significant cash that's gone.

Having spoken to my mobile provider, I now know that if I'd taken their insurance for £12 per month, they would have dealt with it over the phone and given me a replacement the next day for only £15 excess. A bit of research has also told me that you can get annual travel insurance for £36 - divide by the 12 months and that's only £3 a month.

So overall, if you really do want to save money, I'd suggest binning off the bank account upgrade and insuring your phone through the provider and getting your travel insurance elsewhere.

A bit of Googling shows me there's a lot of complaining about this out there, but I haven't seen a story from Martin on it yet. I think it's time he takes these 'upgrade' accounts to task for what they really are - mis-sold!

MissKeith

You have a similar experience to my boyfriends with NatWest. They tried to repair a liquid damaged phone (impossible), replace his discontinued phone with a like for like (which they obviously couldn't get hold of as we were waiting for 3 weeks) and then sent us a cheque for £200 less the value of a second hand replacement on Amazon. Needless to say, I guide people away from their insurance policies daily. Not worth the paper it is written on!

1234

similar problem, it took them 2 weeks to get back to me for futher information, another 2 weeks to turn down my claim, another week to accept the appeal and send the cheque. according to them the cheque take 10 days to send out once they process this (24th Jan), i've been without a phone for over a month, still paying network tariff etc.

as soon as the cheque arrive, i will cancel the benefit account.

fitshase

I'm with Barclays and had an easy experience a couple of years ago with a water damaged phone. I filled out the claim online, got sent a pre-paid pack to post my phone to them and got an e-mail confirming receipt. They then phoned me about 3-4 days later to say they couldn't repair the phone and couldn't source a replacement so they'd checked a few other websites to get the cost of a SIM free phone the same. They offered about £230. I checked a couple of websites and, indeed, I could get it for less than they were offering so I accepted (the lady on the phone said they were only allowed to use about 3 websites - expansys.com was one of them so I was happy with that).

Snakeeyes21

shuldnt all the information you need about how they process claims be in your terms and conditionsa and paperwork? did you read these? probably not.

Unless they state you will get a replacement phone within 24 / 48 hours its best to assume you wont.

Even going to a 3rd party insurer it will often be worse, alot dont cover you for lost or water damaged phones, many assume they do, and are left up !!!! creek when it hits the fan.

IMO these bank accounts offer good value, the travel insurance is often a family policy with alot more benefits than you will get for one for £36.

Take the rbs one £12.95 which covers 2 phones if they are on the same account, that alone is worth the fee and covers more than alot of 3rd party providers.
Family travel insurance with the same cover is worth way more than the £36 you state.
Breakdown cover worth £71 a year.
Home emergency cover again if you use it once in say 10 years its still worth it.
The extended warranty on goods, say you bought a new tv, a shop will charge you like £50 for a 3 year warrenty, its free with this on an unlimited anount of goods.
And a whole host of other things.

These accounts are very good value for money, if you are going to use the full range of benefits.

victor2

Cheapest way is to make sure your house insurance covers personal possessions. My daughter had her handbag knicked at a nightclub. Amongst other things missing was her mobile phone. She had separate cover for it, which paid out with a £25 excess. I explained this to the house insurance, who were covering everything else and they paid the excess, no problem. Told DD to ditch the phone insurance in future as she was covered anyway.

twistedmoosie

Snakeeyes21 wrote: »

shuldnt all the information you need about how they process claims be in your terms and conditionsa and paperwork? did you read these? probably not.

Unless they state you will get a replacement phone within 24 / 48 hours its best to assume you wont.

Even going to a 3rd party insurer it will often be worse, alot dont cover you for lost or water damaged phones, many assume they do, and are left up !!!! creek when it hits the fan.

IMO these bank accounts offer good value, the travel insurance is often a family policy with alot more benefits than you will get for one for £36.

Take the rbs one £12.95 which covers 2 phones if they are on the same account, that alone is worth the fee and covers more than alot of 3rd party providers.
Family travel insurance with the same cover is worth way more than the £36 you state.

Actually I did read the T's and C's, always do, and the clincher is that while they include the bit about having up to 10 working days to consider your claim, there's nothing about timings they can add on before that apart from your responsibilities to call and claim within 48 hours. Natwest don't have a service agreement in terms of timing in place with the insurance company until after the company's uploaded the docs on the system; this is not clear in the T's and C's at all, and in fact I believe the average person wouldn't even know to query this.

So while I agree if you need a family travel insurance policy and car roadside assistance policy these account upgrades do offer good value just for those, I'm going to stick to my guns and say they definitely don't for a non-married-no-kids-or-car'un like myself.