QUELLE HORREUR! Horrendous experience over years, which is ongoing, and was reconfirmed when I telephoned them again yesterday to get some information. Despite having European breakdown cover, AVIVA left my neighbour and me stranded in Belgium for three days in 2014 after the clutch on the insured vehicle failed. After they arranged to collect the vehicle and taken to a repairer, they then refused to repatriate the vehicle or us. Rather than remain holed up in a pokey hotel for the rest of our lives, I ended up forking out cost of train fares and taxis to get us home, which was over £400. When AVIVA finally decided to repatriate the vehicle, it was delivered in a filthy mess and in pieces, with further damage to the panels where their lifting or securing equipment must have been applied prior to or during transportation. After about four days on the telephone, I finally got through to a decent gentleman, a Mr M in the CEO’s office, who accepted responsibility and sought to resolve matters. I recall Mr M mentioning that AVIVA had been experiencing many problems with their agents, RAC in Europe. Mr M said, “In terms of making you feel this is okay, let's imagine a situation where I was to sort out a garage (for the repairs). I am going to take a bit of leave and will try to get this car sorted. Mr K who manages the complaint team ... I am not going to ask him to manage (this) as a complaint. ... Write a summary email which details the expenses which you think you have incurred. ... The Motor claims team will call you to find local garage approved by them. … Send me an email with your expenses.” He also arranged a hire vehicle. The poor car then spent months at repairers only to be returned with yet more problems, e.g. air noise coming through rear door/window, air con problems (e.g. blowing hot where cold should be), missing cap, etc, all of which had been in good condition before the clutch failed and AVIVA arranged for it to be collected from the autobahn. All this while, costs increased, what with phone calls and the numerous times I had to go to and from the repairers, which was a 15 to 20 mile round trip. In the meanwhile, my mother died unexpectedly in 2015, and priorities shifted out of necessity. In May 2016, on the very morning it was to be collected by AVIVA's panel repairers to put right what they had done wrong (wind noise etc), the vehicle was hit whilst parked, by joy-riders who were having an early morning fling hitting as many parked cars as they could up and down the suburban streets. Within hours, and without even sending out an engineer to assess the damage, AVIVA wrote the vehicle off, branded it Cat. D, and so proceeded to undervalue the vehicle for settlement purposes, and ongoing insurance purposes. That is to say, rather than (a) repair the vehicle, or (b) replace the vehicle with something equivalent, or (c) reimburse us for the replacement value so that we could replace the vehicle ourselves with something equivalent, as AVIVA had contracted with us to do, they proceeded to de-value the vehicle permanently, so that if a claim was ever made in the future, they would pay only a fraction of what it would normally be worth without the Cat. D. AVIVA undervalued the replacement value of the vehicle at a rate that was approximately 25% less than its true value. (The make and model of this particular vehicle holds its value very well, particularly with such low miles as this one.) They put many hoops in front of me which I had to jump through, in terms of providing evidence and so forth and, without producing any evidence of their decisions, continued misguided, in a state of total denial, rejecting all the facts that were presented to them, in favour of their own pre-determined outcome conducive only to them. What is more, as part of their “offer” if we were to keep the vehicle, AVIVA sought to deduct £1,120 allegedly for salvage etc. which figure, upon enquiry with the salvage company, turned out to be about £960 more than what they confirmed they would have paid. That is to say, while the salvage company said they would have paid £160 for the vehicle, AVIVA sought to deprive us of another £960 on top of that, that is £1,120 in total. Nothing made common sense or rang true and it quickly became obvious that whichever path, there was a formula which AVIVA were adhering to, and that honesty, fairness and that the insurance ‘contract of utmost good faith’ which we had with them did not come into the equation. What was certain was that we would lose out while AVIVA would make £100,000,000s in profit. So, this is how AVIVA treated its customers who had never been in an accident. With no resolution in sight, I attempted to escalate the matter to Mr M in the CEO’s office. But, Mr M, I then learned, had moved on to a bigger and better position within the company. Instead, a Mr S took over, and proceeded in the same vein as his colleagues/subordinates to kill off any chance of settlement. To add further insult to injury and old wounds, Mr S proceeded to undermine and renege on every honourable thing that Mr M had done previously in 2014 and, in addition to his and his colleagues’ various attempts to rip us off (in 2016), he also refused to reimburse me for any of my losses relating to the 2014 episode alleging, quite incorrectly, that our contract had been with RAC and not AVIVA, and that RAC had already rejected the claim in 2014! All of this was untrue since Mr M had already been dealing with the matter and, having taken responsibility for the matter, asked me to send through receipts (which were ongoing), and was already authorising payment of other invoices provided by third parties. As for no claims bonus and the drivers' insurance record/history generally, AVIVA advised in 2016 that so long as they were able to successfully claim from third party’s insurers, none of that would be affected by the 2016 incident. So surely all losses would be recovered from the third party insurers, right? So then, what was the problem? Part of the answer to that was unravelled yesterday. Well, unbeknownst to us, despite AVIVA having all the third party details, the new guy in the CEO’s office, Mr S, reluctantly confirmed only yesterday (6 September 2018) that, in truth, AVIVA had made no claim at all against the third party insurers - a crucial fact which he chose to withhold in 2016. In the meanwhile, AVIVA has proceeded in the interim to make misleading statements on insurance documents that I had been in an accident in 2016, thereby creating a manifestly incorrect and libelous record about me which, as readers will no doubt appreciate, negatively impacts upon me personally and financially. Since then, and with matters unresolved, AVIVA have proceeded to increase the cost of insuring the vehicle by £100s, and we are £1,000s out of pocket. For AVIVA to deny any responsibility for all the distress and loss that they and their agents have created, using such underhand tactics in the process, is thoroughly dishonest and unethical. According to the legal doctrine of 'estoppel' (based on both common law and equity), AVIVA were estopped from refusing to pay out in 2016, after having finally and quite sensibly elected to resolve matters in 2014. Yet, they proceeded once more in 2016 to breach their agreement and that doctrine, and compound it with a further breach of the insurance contract of ‘utmost good faith’, only to leave us “stranded” for a second time. They have learned nothing, and it is “Quelle horreur” all over again. Certainly the Financial Ombudsman, which AVIVA love to direct customers to, is no reliable avenue to achieve a just and equitable outcome, since they themselves are grappling with reports about their own inexplicable and apparently unethical conduct, evidence of which was uncovered in a Dispatches investigation earlier this year. Who pays the Piper …