European Breakdown Recovery - yesterday!

After 25 years caravanning abroad without incident it finally happened. Yesterday the auto box on our 3 litre BMW X5 failed in Germany. Lunchtime today we were back home courtesy BA from Luxemburg with the car and van parked at a small BMW garage in Saarburg awaiting recovery to UK which will take up to three weeks.

For 23 years we used Red Pennant but for the last two years have used our insurance company which basically links to AA European Operations Centre (they handle a lot of different insurers business).  It is about half the cost of Red Pennant.

So the point of this post? We phoned UK at 9 am, recovery vehicle turned up 90 minutes later to take car and van to BMW garage who took 5 minutes to diagnose the problem. It then took until 5 pm to resolve the course of action with the AA and get flight details.  Cost in mobile calls about £17 but would have been much more but for the generosity of BMW who helped us out despite not getting any of the business. They even booked a local hotel for us and gave us a lift there from the garage. They will also store the van and car for free.

There were a lot of arguments along the way - your insurance expired two years ago (not true but that took an hour), we won't recover vans over 7m in  total overall length (the AA won't but my policy is different), we wont recover if the cost exceeds the value of the vehicle etc. but all was resolved and at the point of delivery the service was good - it just took a long time and we were speaking to different operators in France every time as they didn't phone back in a timely manner.

Lessons learned - read the policy carefully and of course take it with you. Know how to top up your phone on the move, activate Voicemail in the UK, can they really provide a replacement car with tow ball, 13 Pin DIN, and capable of towing a 1600 kg Bailey ("no" seemed to be the answer) - then you have to swap cars at Calais. etc.etc. Hence the decision to fly back.

Probably next time it will be Red Pennant but I will of course read the terms and conditions carefully!