Admiral Car Breakdown...?

Imprisoning

Hi all,

Hope you're well. Apologies if this is a bit wordy. Hopefully, you will bear with me.

Last Friday, I was driving from Glasgow to Newport (370-odd miles) and at about 11pm (and pretty much exactly half-way through my journey) my gearbox gave out.

I called Admiral, only to find that when selecting my breakdown cover, I had selected "Local Cover" when taking out the policy, which meant I was only entitled to recovery to a single destination within 10 miles... Unfortunately this was of little use to me, given that:
a) I was attending something the next morning (hence the journey) that I couldn't miss.. and;
b) there were no trains until the next morning - which was too late.
(If it had not been for this, combined with the fact that I had to get to work in Glasgow on the Monday morning, I would probably have asked them to dump it at a carpark/roadside, got a train back to Newport, and dealt with the broken car later that weekend.)

Anyway, I figured that my best option was to ask them to tow me to Wales, for which they quoted me the modest sum of £550.
Now, I fully expected to incur some costs because I didn't pay their increased premiums for their National cover, but nonetheless this does seem somewhat steep to me, especially given that I was actually paying them for some form of breakdown cover.

My questions are relatively simple:
What could I have done differently? and;
Are these "normal" costs for towing?

Anyway, apologies if this is a bit of rant. Hopefully you will understand the reason I am a touch upset!

Thanks for reading.

Richard53

Imprisoning wrote: »

My questions are relatively simple:
What could I have done differently? and;
Are these "normal" costs for towing?

A. Checked your cover more carefully at the time you took it out. Presumably you were given written confirmation of the cover you had chosen, so Admiral have only done what you asked of them.


B. Yes, given that they have you over a barrel and charge pretty much what they like.


Sorry I can't be more sympathetic, but hopefully lesson learned.

Lomast

Actually those costs seem quite reasonable, i had to take my trailer to pick up a friend's car a few months back after he broke down on a motorway without breakdown cover. The police turned up and insisted on calling their local recovery firm to get him off the motorway and after they towed him 12 odd miles to the next junction he was handed a bill for £780

forgotmyname

150 mile tow, 300 mile round trip for the recovery driver, Late at night so probably higher rates than the daytime shift.

Take out proper breakdown cover in future. Do you need home start, Hire car if a similar thing happened again?

You paid for some cover. Yes but thats like saying your took out 3rd party cover and want to claim for damage to your car that you caused.

The cover you had didnt apply to the situation you were in tso essentially the same as having no cover.

Aretnap

I suppose what you could have done differently would have been to phone a few recovery companies (Google would have found some local ones) and see if they'd do it for less than £550.

No idea what the average price is, but here's a company picked at random from Google which charges £2/mile one way for a late night tow, so if that's typical £550 for 185ish miles is a tad expensive, but perhaps not ludicrously so.

http://www.on-callrecovery.co.uk/prices.php