Auto renewal failure

jmsgld

I have car insurance set to auto renew, it failed. Luckily I found out on the same day and contacted customer services. After 2 hours on chat I ended up buying a new policy with the same insurer and they agreed to refund the price difference. I couldn't remember the exact figure so logged in to my credit card to check, only to find that they had taken the money both for the failed auto-renew and the new policy. I was still on chat so flagged this and they assured me that it would bounce back. 

I checked the next day and it had not bounced back, and was no longer "pending". 
I wasted another hour trying to get through on the phone and then another hour on chat, only to be told that I would have to contact them again once the statement had come through as proof. I had already sent them screen shots. 
At this point I had already wasted hours on their mistake and so refused to waste any more time on this. I asked the chat person to raise a complaint on my behalf, I believe that she did so but I had further questions but she ended the chat before I had a chance to respond. 

Any thoughts on next steps, whichever will take the least amount of time as I have really already wasted too much time on this. 

DullGreyGuy

The safest option is to allow the complaint to go through. You could do a chargeback with the bank but you risk it being associated with your new policy which then gets cancelled for non-payment and then just adds to your complaint. 

jmsgld

Thanks, creating a chargeback would be more work, and I don't want to do anything that might risk them cancelling the good policy by mistake. I guess I'll just wait. It seems an odd and potentially quite serious mistake for them to make, I would have been mortified had I been pulled over for driving without insurance...

DullGreyGuy

jmsgld said:

Thanks, creating a chargeback would be more work, and I don't want to do anything that might risk them cancelling the good policy by mistake. I guess I'll just wait. It seems an odd and potentially quite serious mistake for them to make, I would have been mortified had I been pulled over for driving without insurance...

Having been on the other side... being the insurer thats sent someone a renewal notice saying it will happen automatically and then something at our end failed and it didn't and the person was stopped by the police it is thankfully fairly easy to fix. We write a letter of indemnity advising that whilst a problem meant a policy wasn't issued on time we have since issued a backdated policy and would have covered any incident that had happened plus send an appropriate compensation cheque for the distress. 

More often these things happen where our agent mishears a vehicle registration and so certificate has 1 letter wrong but its one of the few "get out of jail free" cards that do exist. 

jmsgld

It is odd, I have had that car insured with the same provider for somewhere between 5 and 10 years. It seriously lucky that it happened this week and not last week, they would have had one hell of a compensation cheque to write if it had happened last week.