57 days and counting since a claim made through Cover More trademark icarhireinsurance
Purchased insurance via Cover-More's trademark company/business, icarhireinsurance.com. The actual insurance appears to be outsourced to a company in Prague.
July 23rd: Had an accident in Italy without any other vehicle or persons involved and no injuries. My first ever accident, and first ever insurance claim.
July 26th: Returned the car, paid the charges, got the required paperwork from the car rental company.
July 27th: Attempted to raise a claim as instructed, via the defend-online.eu form (which seems to be an entirely different company). I didn't have a credit card statement showing the payment made to the car rental, because it hadn't yet been generated by the bank. The webpage stated that if you didn't have all the documents, you could still submit and and add the rest later. You cannot, the form won't let you.
Using the only address I could find, customerservice at icarhireinsurance.com, I emailed to state this problem. They replied they couldn't help, and to contact carhireexcessclaims at defendinsurance.co.uk which I did. Had an autoreply, but never received any human response.
July 29th: Managed to generate a transaction statement from my bank instead. Submitted the claim. Received an automatic email (DEFEND#67611) that states claims are taking 15 business days to process but "Claims submitted through our website are processed within 5 business days."
August 15th: Emailed to ask if there were problems processing the claim. Got another autoreply email.
August 17th: 14 business days later no update.
August 19th: Received a reply noting that the claim had been logged into the system and issued with Claim Number 24070931, with a request for more information - a bank statement showing the exchange rate, and clarification why I hadn't been charged for some other bits on the bill.
August 22nd: Information provided as best I can and asked if this was sufficient. Got another autoreply email.
September 16th: Replied to ask if there was a problem with the information provided. Got another autoreply email.
There's no portal to track your claim progress sadly so it's just a case of sending the information and waiting. It feels like a very stressful, concerning black box process. All while the payment performed via credit card is being charged interest.
September 21, 2024
Unprompted review