Car Breakdown Cover

[swanfan]

I'm looking for some breakdown cover & have found these 2 companies but does anybody have any experience of them.

1) FIRST CALL GB Ltd

2) AutoAid

Auto Aid is a pay & reclaim company:-

Is Pay and Reclaim for me?
There are two types of breakdown cover and it's important to understand which you're getting.

• Automatic Service. With this, you simply call when you break down and they send their patrols (or sometimes sub-contracted ones) to sort it. Breakdown heavyweights RAC and AA both work this way.
• Pay and Claim. This is the one many haven't heard of. When there's a problem, they send a local recovery firm either chosen by you or them, rather than their own patrols. You then pay for the repairs (let them know if you want to pay by card so they can ensure the patrol takes it), and send receipts to claim it back later - it's effectively an insurance scheme.

Automatic service companies are more convenient, yet pay and claims can be cheaper. In terms of the call out time, there's little difference as this depends far more on the specific company than the policy type.
Before going for pay and claim, ask yourself:

• How often will you use it?
  
  If your car's in need of constant attention, it's probably best to get an autoservice policy to save hassle. Yet if you've a reliable car, breakdown cover's really an insurance policy against a worst case scenario, so pay and claim is just a one-off back up plan.
• Will you send in your receipts?
  
  What drives (sorry) many round the bend with pay and claim is that it's easy to forget to send the receipts to reclaim the cash. In fact, this is what allows the policies to be cheap - it means the companies pay out less. So if you're the forgetful type, or simply wouldn't bother, pay and claims are best avoided.

[Pixie]

Re: Car Breakdown Cover

I'm in my second year with AutoAid but haven't needed to claim from them.

I decided to use AutoAid because I was paying a lot of money out to the AA 'just in case' I needed to use them and, in fact, I hadn't needed to call them out for the last 5 years.

Before I took out the policy the first time I read about them on 'the green site' and everyone had given them very positive feedback. It only cost £38 for the year - a fraction of the cost for similar cover from AA or RAC.

The only drawback to it is if you forget to send in the reclaim forms but, as we're all so money aware on this forum, we aren't likely to forget!