Nationwide flexaccount European insurance

balcombeite

Nationwide is ranked by Money Saving Expert & the Sunday Times as a top performer/provider but this should probably be reviewed.

The FlexPlus account presently costs £ 13 per month and pays 3% on up to £ 2500 per month. In November the 3% will cease losing customers in excess of £6 interest per month and hence making the account, in essence, cost £ 13 + £ 6 = £ 19 per month; - a high cost for this type of account.

In addition to the above, the Nationwide 5% Regular Saver account is now down to only £ 250 per month. Last year this was £ 500 and the year before £1000.

The age limit for Travel Insurance has also been reduced from 75 years to 70 years meaning customers over the age of 70 need to cough up an additional amount of £ 65 to maintain coverage.

As a Pensioner, the above changes have added substantial costs to the running of this type of account especially when some of the previous benefits are no longer applicable. Do they still deserve to be in your top 3 accounts ??

Most of the benefits can now be had for less than the cost of maintaining this account.

IvanDP

badger09 wrote: »

You might be interested in a short thread I started a couple of days ago:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6042193/annual-worldwide-travel-insurance-recommendations

Thanks for the info.
We are fortunate that we are both well under 70 and have no pre-existing conditions, so it looks like Nationwide upgrade will be good value for us. :j

SevenOfNine

The FlexPlus is best value for us, even when it went up to £13 pm. I've had my car towed twice & make 1 long haul & 1 worldwide trip per year. Some medical declaration issues & the 'age' extra will go on this year, but it's still good value for us.

However, I was hospitalised in Jamaica this year, ambulance + general anaesthetic operation, total cost USD $3000 for the ambulance & $12000 for the op & 1 night in the hospital.

The claim (though it was agreed without a shadow of doubt that I was fully covered by the 2nd day) was a proper PAIN. Emails, phone calls, official complaint...…..ENDLESS. It's a good job I was fit to deal with it all on my return home.

Nationwide dragged out hospital payment for weeks, the claims call centre contradicted themselves at every turn. When it was FINALLY settled as far as the hospital invoice was concerned, they took months to settle the ambulance invoice, I kept getting RED invoices demanding payment, they kept promising to pay, then assuring me they'd paid - they hadn't!

In the end I made a formal complaint after being assured by the ambulance company that they were still waiting for payment some 6 or so 'reminders' later. Only then was their invoice paid.

Though a reasonable price, I'm a bit wary of the customer service now! Frankly, it was a shambles & should not take the 'formal complaint' process to get invoices paid when agreement to do so was arranged promptly. Apparently they waste endless amounts of time 'bartering' the cost downwards with the medical providers.

badger09

SevenOfNine wrote: »

The FlexPlus is best value for us, even when it went up to £13 pm. I've had my car towed twice & make 1 long haul & 1 worldwide trip per year. Some medical declaration issues & the 'age' extra will go on this year, but it's still good value for us.

However, I was hospitalised in Jamaica this year, ambulance + general anaesthetic operation, total cost USD $3000 for the ambulance & $12000 for the op & 1 night in the hospital.

The claim (though it was agreed without a shadow of doubt that I was fully covered by the 2nd day) was a proper PAIN. Emails, phone calls, official complaint...…..ENDLESS. It's a good job I was fit to deal with it all on my return home.

Nationwide dragged out hospital payment for weeks, the claims call centre contradicted themselves at every turn. When it was FINALLY settled as far as the hospital invoice was concerned, they took months to settle the ambulance invoice, I kept getting RED invoices demanding payment, they kept promising to pay, then assuring me they'd paid - they hadn't!

In the end I made a formal complaint after being assured by the ambulance company that they were still waiting for payment some 6 or so 'reminders' later. Only then was their invoice paid.

Though a reasonable price, I'm a bit wary of the customer service now! Frankly, it was a shambles & should not take the 'formal complaint' process to get invoices paid when agreement to do so was arranged promptly. Apparently they waste endless amounts of time 'bartering' the cost downwards with the medical providers.

Agree with much of this.

The method of uploading documents is absolutely horrendous, not helped by their strange naming of multiple categories of documents.

We didn't have to go as far as a formal complaint to get our claims paid in full.

Fortunately we've never had to claim before, so have no other company's process for comparison.

Fingers crossed you/we never have to claim again.

Roger1

balcombeite wrote: »

...

The FlexPlus account presently costs £ 13 per month and pays 3% on up to £ 2500 per month. In November the 3% will cease losing customers in excess of £6 interest per month and hence making the account, in essence, cost £ 13 + £ 6 = £ 19 per month;

Are you counting £6 twice? You could say it's currently costing you £13 less £6 = £7 net, so long as you keep a minimum of £2,500 in your current account; it will revert to £13, nowhere near £19

- a high cost for this type of account.

It depends on how you use the account. It works fine for my wife and me.

...

The age limit for Travel Insurance has also been reduced from 75 years to 70 years meaning customers over the age of 70 need to cough up an additional amount of £ 65 to maintain coverage.

Bargain! Can you find better?
...

Most of the benefits can now be had for less than the cost of maintaining this account.

Most? Again, it depends on your needs. For us as fellow pensioners, it works well.

blindman

badger09 wrote: »

Agree with much of this.

The method of uploading documents is absolutely horrendous, not helped by their strange naming of multiple categories of documents.

We didn't have to go as far as a formal complaint to get our claims paid in full.

Fortunately we've never had to claim before, so have no other company's process for comparison.

Fingers crossed you/we never have to claim again.

An update to my Nationwide claim as mentioned in post#4

The good news:
It has been paid without any quibble re costs:-

The bad news:-
It took nearly a month to resolve and their communication was non existent and blatant lies, when I did get a response.

I had to raise a complaint about the process and this to be fair was dealt with inside 2 days and the supervisor finalised the claim there and then and offered compensation which covered the excess. I received both this and the full claim 3 days later. :T

The problems were:-
1. Further request for information were only communicated by email and always had the line stating "We have tried to contact you but could not reach you" which was a blatant lie. :mad:
I was initially told if there was any query then someone would RING and TALK to me to sort any issues.

2. Further uploads ,when received, put the claim to the BACK of the QUEUE so I had to wait a further 9 days before I got ANOTHER email exactly like the first one. :mad:

3.Contacting CS claims was useless as there was No Consistency as to who was handling the claim so they would read the claim from scratch and seemed not to understand the issue.

4. Initially I was advised to add a "covering letter" in the last section to explain any documents. I did this but the formatting was bad so it appeared as one whole unreadable paragraph. NO-ONE seemed to read this anyway. On my last upload of documents I uploaded the actual Word doc-Still no-one read it :mad:

Overall a very frustrating experience which was only resolved by raising a complaint which led to a supervisor with 13 years experience handling the claim in one sitting.

This was my first ever claim on any Travel insurance, and whilst NW did not quibble about any claims for travel\accommodation etc. the procedure was far from smooth :eek:

System

Roger1 wrote: »

Again, it depends on your needs. For us as fellow pensioners, it works well.

If it was reviewed for costings - it should be clearly be charged per account holder - us singleton are clearly subsidising you joint types - at least until the 1 Nov