I Don’t Believe It Either

Following on from SteamdrivenAndy’s recent moving home experience, I’ve come across a hurdle of another kind, with my motorhome insurer.

The sale of my Durham home completes on Tuesday of next week and in preparation, I have moved all of my possessions over to my fiancée’s house in Kirkcudbright, leaving the keys to my empty house with my Estate Agent in Durham.

My fiancée’s house is under offer and is due to complete in October, coinciding with the completion of a bungalow we have bought together in town.

As both my car and motorhome came over to Kirkcudbright yesterday and are parked on the driveway, I thought it best to update my insurance companies.

Churchill car insurance, amended my policy in minutes, no issues whatsoever.

Comfort van insurance couldn’t have tried harder to lose a long standing customer.... They won’t cover me at the new address unless I register on the electoral role, even if it is only for a few weeks. 
OK, as busy a time as this is and stressful enough, I’ve registered online, but can’t guarantee that due to Covid delays, that the change will take place before we move in to our new home.

Updated Comfort that it has been done and sent them a copy of the confirmation email and reference number. 
They’ve still declined to cover me until I also re-register my V5 document at this address as well as my driving licence. 

Am I being unreasonable thinking that for the sake of a few weeks, they could have done similar to Churchill, rather than me having to jump through hoops, at a time when such services are severely delayed due to Covid backlogs.

Surely I can’t be their first customer that has moved home with a temporary address in the interim 

My thoughts are if they are that pedantic with someone moving home, surely  a common occurrence, how are they going to be when handling a claim. I think I would not be renewing with them.

Mike

Sounds like a very tick-box driven mentality from Comfort, with no application of common sense or pragmatism.

Contrast this with Safeguard: since retiring, we spend even more time at our place in Fife, frequently staying for several months at a time and often the Pollensa comes with us, despite our official 'home' address still being our house in Berkshire where our licences, vehicles etc are registered. I advised Safeguard of this a few years ago and they said no problem with maintaining continuous cover whichever address we were staying at any time, they simply made a note on our file of our Fife postcode. No issues over electoral rolls, V5s or whatever.

Thanks Mike and Roger and I couldn’t agree more. 

To make matters worse, when they responded that I need to sort out my licence and V5, they ended their email asking me to advise them if this is something I’d be doing. 
Before I even had time to tell them that I would be doing as they requested, they issued me with a 7 day cancellation notice, effective from today. 
They’re fully aware that my completion isn’t until next Tuesday, so I’m still legally the owner of my own house until then and the notice should not have been issued until Tuesday.
If there are any delays in the legal process, such as SteamDrivenAndy encountered, that legal position would be extended.

It’s amazing what a whinge in the right ear can achieve.... common sense prevails.

I escalated my complaint this morning to managerial level, resulting in Comfort taking my situation directly to Aviva, who in turn have agreed to note my temporary address on file, without the need to change any of my documentation.

Formal resolution of my complaint is seeing last week’s member of staff receiving a wee bit of training.

Glad you finally got a pragmatic result.

Part of the problem is lack of training, but also lack of applied common sense. However it's not always the individual's fault - many organisations have now removed any capability for using initiative, even at supervisor/middle management level. Bank managers are a case in point - your local manager was once completely in charge of all decision making in the branch, now they are no longer enabled to do much at all without reference to regional/head office.

Very frustrating for them as well as the customers.