is 6 months plus, normal for claim on Continental insurer?

Gastines3

Whilst driving in Belgium in June, a local driver drove into our car.He admitted it was his fault,completed the required European accident form giving his name/address etc. details of his insurer,drawing of the accident and his admission of fault.Completed in Belgian might I add. After 6 months of various delaying tactics.or very poor office procedure, I 'm still waiting for a settlement. Excuses include ,Can't find the Insurer,the address is on the form and takes a couple of seconds to find on the Web. Now have to deal with their U.K. agent who are having problems translating the documents???A U.K. agent for a Belgian Company !!!Now after many e_mails to various people at the claims department they advise that liability has been accepted and repayment is being dealt with. Might be fun for them but the difference in having no claims and this one as a possible claim on my policy is approx. £400. I now believe this is just an exercise in holding onto cash and hoping you renew your policy at the higher rate. Very poor way of treating clients but seems to be the norm in Insurance today.

InsideInsurance

Its the third party insurer who is "holding onto the cash" if anyone is and the insurance market is no way as friendly such that insurer A delays payment to insurer B so that insurer B gets the opportunity to try and get an increased premium for a few weeks.

Never dealt with cases where our insured were overseas at the time of the accident as there was a specialist team that dealt with those but there were plenty of cases where the third party were from overseas and in the UK at the time of crash.

We are talking a few years ago now so things may be a bit more electronic now but all claims used to be slow and international ones were even more so. The level of delegation between the foreign insurer and their uk representatives used to vary massively and in some cases the foreign insurer sometimes seemed simply not to believe their delegate and so you added further delay of the foreign insurer researching UK law etc.

As the incident happened in Belgium then it will work to their typical timescales plus some for the international aspect. I've no idea of their timescales but certainly France for example then claims typically are massively longer than the UK

dacouch

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Never dealt with cases where our insured were overseas at the time of the accident as there was a specialist team that dealt with those but there were plenty of cases where the third party were from overseas and in the UK at the time of crash.

Reminds me of the Aviva just after they transferred a lot of the non specialist claims handlers to India. You had no choice but to go through the new call centre. We had quite a few overseas drivers with Aviva and dealt with quite a few of these as claims.

We had one client whose claim was dragging on and kept getting the run around on the call centre. We involved a senior point of contact and discovered the reason for the delay was Aviva had a specialist team to deal with accidents abroad or with foreign drivers. The name of the department was informally called "Johny foreigner" and any inter departmental letters or documents were simply addressed to "Johny Foreigner". The call centre had discovered Johny Foreigner dealt with overseas accidents but could not find Johny Foreigner listed as one of the personal internal extension numbers so could never reach them on the phones.