Car insurance auto renew without email or post notification

paddyposh

Hi all. So we had Admiral insurance which was due for renewal on 11th April 2023, and I noticed my DD on 1st May didn't come out so I logged onto their online portal to check and notice it had auto renewed. The documents were on there, but usually we get an email or letter advising of this in advance. I checked and I definitely didn't get any emails etc.

I spoke with Admiral and they agreed to cancel the policy with no fees, which was great, and I have since got a new policy elsewhere. However, the first payment on 1st May had failed when I checked 2 days later as it had doubled almost in cost and therefore my bills account didn't have the correct money in. 

They have sent a letter which I got today stating it is a notice of default and want the payment paid by 19th May (£81). Am I within my rights to challenge this? Due to the fact we received no notification of the auto renewal (other than the documents in the MyAdmiral portal).

DullGreyGuy

When you spoke to Admiral and said you didnt receive notification they almost certainly will have told you the date and method the renewal notice was sent. Realistically its more likely that you accidently deleted it/it went into spam folder etc than it wasnt sent. 

paddyposh

DullGreyGuy said:

When you spoke to Admiral and said you didnt receive notification they almost certainly will have told you the date and method the renewal notice was sent. Realistically its more likely that you accidently deleted it/it went into spam folder etc than it wasnt sent. 

They didn't say anything, they just checked and then after putting me on hold said it was fine to cancel it (with no fee, about 3 weeks after it renewed so out of the 14 day grace period)

Lavendyr

If they didn't advise you at all of the auto-renewal and they also confirmed on the phone it was OK to cancel with no fee, then yes definitely challenge. 

I had a similar experience with Elephant some years back, who are part of the same group I believe. Having renewed my policy after a telephone conversation with them where I asked them to match another quote, they wrote to me some months later saying they had become aware of incidents that were not declared at renewal and wanted to charge me an extra £200 for the policy year. Never mind that they were my insurer during the time said incidents (non-fault) happened and were therefore already aware of them, I had also set them out during the phone call at renewal. In the end they went back to the recording of the phone call when I renewed, admitted that I had declared the incidents and backed down. 

So do challenge. 

DullGreyGuy

paddyposh said:

DullGreyGuy said:

When you spoke to Admiral and said you didnt receive notification they almost certainly will have told you the date and method the renewal notice was sent. Realistically its more likely that you accidently deleted it/it went into spam folder etc than it wasnt sent. 

They didn't say anything, they just checked and then after putting me on hold said it was fine to cancel it (with no fee, about 3 weeks after it renewed so out of the 14 day grace period)

Then ask them... they have 7.2m customers in the UK meaning on average they are sending c20,000 renewal quotes a day. In my experience its far more common for customers to miss a renewal notice than for a system to "forget" to send just one customer a renewal. Systems do fail but they normally bring down all the renewal quotes and when 20,000 letters/emails are missing then you hear about it. 

They arent a small broker where someone manually hand stuffs the renewal envelopes where the risk of a mistake is massively higher.