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Old 19 March 2003, 10:19 AM
  #1  
Silverman
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Has anyone had any dealings with Bell Direct when it comes to claims. They say that you only find out how good your insurance company is when you need to make a claim.
Car WRX sti import.
Accident 14th Feb (just popped out for some flowers)
To date No repair work undertaken.
Who should I be greifing? the insurance company or the repair centre? Advive and comments appreciated.
Old 20 March 2003, 01:53 PM
  #2  
rogp
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I have had a very bad experience with Bell direct, although my claim was on a 205 Gti and not a Scooby. Eventual payout was a pittance and my protests fell on deaf ears. Their administration department seems a little disorganised as I received multiple copies of claims forms etc.

All in all I couldn't not recommend them, but thats just my opinion.

Roger

[Edited by rogp - 20/03/2003 14:08:10]
Old 26 March 2003, 07:27 PM
  #3  
bogie
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I was insured with Bell "End" Direct with my first Scoob back in '98 - '99.

Had a wee accident and the car was taken and repiared ASAP, repairer was absolutely excellent, would not put any of my cars to any other body shop now. But that is not priase to Bell Direct but the body shop.

When renewal cam they trippled my premium, that was with protected no claims. It went from about 470 to 1500 quid, talk about a **** off hint!

Bogie
Old 27 March 2003, 03:50 PM
  #4  
Dan B
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Bell Direct are a bunch of "new scoobynet laws prevents use of correct term" not a very clever company...
Old 27 March 2003, 04:26 PM
  #5  
hail-hail
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I've insurance with Bell and have claimed from them.

Bought a STiRA and insured it for approx £1400 (clean license, 1 fault, 1 no fault claim).
Wrote it off 10 days later, paid 10k for the car got 9.5k back.
Told that I would not get any refund on my policy but could buy the same car again and they would honour the rest of the policy (355 days ) for no further charge.
Reinsured with them, this time it cost £1800 but I had the claim plus 8 points on my license.

All in all my dealings with them have been good.
Old 27 March 2003, 07:23 PM
  #6  
bluto22b
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Cool

>Bell Direct are a bunch of "new scoobynet laws prevents use of correct term"
lol

What you mean they are a set of S****horpe s? lol
Old 28 March 2003, 12:40 PM
  #7  
SULS
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<Rant>
What ever you do do not insure with Bell Direct, I did and had to claim, we are still fighting with them now.
Accident was the 4 th December last year when some clever chap went flying into the back of our GTI6 at about 60 / 70 mph while the Mrs was driving up to see her mother.
Car was clearly written off , sub frame knackered (http://www.sulutions.co.uk/306gti6.htm)and the acident clearly the third parties fault.

We have still not been properly compensated for the car it now being nearly April 2003.

Bell direct ***** ed up every aspect of our claim took them 5 weeks to assess the car as a write off in the first place, at which point they were already trying to take our hire car off us.
The saga goes on and on I'll find the letter I sent them and post as a follow up in a second save saying it all again.

The real kicker being that they offered us the princely sum of £3400 for the car, I have what car price guide here stating £6400 Parkers £5600 . Not to mention the fact they will not even consider replacing the Hifi and 6 disk changer covered for up to £750.

After a 6 week battle I have them up to 4400 (less 500 excess we may get back in 2 years time when the court case comes through) and they will not go higher.
I have battled and battled with this, numerous letters, hundreds of phone calls about 50 hours of wasted time, and bell will not budge, even when you can finally get them to respond to you.

I have now been forced to put the case in the hands of the financial Ombusman and will be contacting trading standards regarding the complete lack of service from Bell Direct.

Alls I can say if if you considering Bell direct dont bother. They easily rate as the worst company I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
I have been left in the situation of taking a £2000 loan to replace (like for like) a car that was fully insured with PNCB, 4 years NCB ,never had an accident and writen off by a third party. The only up side was it given me the opertunity to loan a little more cash and I shall be picking up my 94 Import WRX a week saturday <rubs hands in glee>.

To conlucde Bell Direct are a <insert string of 4 letter words> bunch of muppets who will rip you off soon as look at you, providing you can get hold of them of course
</rant>


[Edited by SULS - 3/28/2003 1:10:23 PM]

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Old 28 March 2003, 01:16 PM
  #8  
SULS
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Just in case your not convinced yet

Dear Ms Joyce

We write to complain about the handling of our current and outstanding insurance claim.
To date we have quite frankly been disgusted with the service we received from Bell Direct and now find ourselves at our wits end and effectively banging our heads against a brick wall for what should have been a straight forward insurance claim.

The accident, which occurred some two months ago now was clear cut in that liability was with the 3rd party as Teresa was hit at speed from directly behind, and also that the car was visibly written off due to the high speed impact. To our knowledge this has not been disputed.
Yet despite the simple nature of the claim it would appear it is too much for Bell to handle.

We initially reported the accident the following day to the incident, and arranged the accident report forms, which were returned by return of post, these appear to have disappeared on arrival at your offices. We were only informed that the papers had not been processed when we phoned to check the progress of the claim. It is only fortunate that we had the foresight to copy the papers before returning them to you that we were able to fax them.
Secondly it appears Bell did nothing to process our claim for some weeks after receiving the relevant papers I think this is highlighted by the fact that we personally told Bell the third parties insurance details as you did not have them some weeks after the accident. These were known to us via the personal injury solicitor instructed for the same incident, who it appears had time to be initially instructed, write to us, receive our account of the incident, reply to this and find out the third parties insurance details (unknown at the time as the driver did not stop). All this in the time it took Bell to do nothing at all.
This is despite almost daily phone calls (some days many calls per day) to which we were given excuses such as ¡¥the weather has been bad and we have a lot of claims¡¦.
I fail to see what you would expect in the British winter and do not see this as any excuse for not processing our claim in a timely manner.

We were also informed while again chasing daily to have the car assessed some weeks on, that the engineers were at least 5 day behind on all damage assessments. You eventually wrote the car off and we received conformation of this and a letter requesting driving license mandate, MOT certificate etc on the 3rd of January, these were promptly posted recorded delivery by return of post. Please note it took Bell some 28 days to assess the car, a process that should take no longer than 7 days.

The delay in assessing the car and therefore in making an offer then left us without a hire car.
With no warning from Bell, AVR (the rental company) contacted us to inform us that that they would be collecting the car. Only by fighting with Bell on a daily basis having to insist on speaking to supervisors and managers were we able to retain the car for a further 9 days although doing this we were still left car less 3 days before receiving any offer from Bell. This in itself was again only due to us contacting the DVLA directly and requesting the relevant driving license history was faxed to your office in order for the offer to be released. Again a job that is surely Bells.

The offer on its eventual arrival was assuming to say the least. Again we find ourselves battling with your claims department to be offered a value for which we can replace our vehicle. Despite supplying numerous example of the current market price to replace the car your claims department refuses to come anywhere close to a reasonable offer, sighting one dubious advertisement on the auto trader web site containing a non contactable telephone number (that is a fax line) as their evidence. We can and have provided many examples to prove otherwise.
We have no interest in the current Glasses guide price for the car, we are simply interested in replacing the vehicle. Nor do we accept that if you can find an example of the car of same age and mileage at Franks Cut and Shut that we should accept this value of the car. We took great care when initially purchasing the car and would do so again, buying with warranty from a respected dealer.
Also despite being assured when initially filing the claim that the value of the 6CD changer and head unit would added to any offer, your claims department refuses to accept this.
Having again rejected your offer last week we are told the case is now with the claims manager. The case was promised to be reviewed Friday or Today at the latest and I was assured that we would be rung with the details.
Unsurprisingly we received no call and upon again phoning Bell to query this late this afternoon were told that the claims was manager too busy to process our claim.

From day one of this claim dealing with Bell has been a nightmare, the claim is only at the current stage due to our dogged pursuement of each and every part of the claim, even doing Bells job in many areas. We have been lied to, phone calls ignored or not returned and documents lost the list goes on.
We fail to see what you are doing for the near 1000 pounds we are paying you a year in insurance when you can not even process a simple write off where the third party has admitted liability.





Thus we expect the following
„X A prompt and full written response to all points in this letter
„X A refund on our insurance premiums for the fact that Bell simply has not carried out its duties
„X A prompt and reasonable offer for replacement value of the car
„X Compensation for the fact we still have no reasonable offer or transport some two months on
„X Compensation for the unnecessary hours wasted dealing with this

Please note we offer you this opportunity to comment on these points and resolve this matter promptly before we put the case in the hands of the Financial Ombudsman and or our solicitors.

Regards,
Old 28 March 2003, 01:22 PM
  #9  
SULS
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Some more


Dear Ms Griffiths

Firstly thank you for your response to our letter of the 27th January.
We understand the terms of our policy and the fact that the policy is non refundable thus thank you for your gesture of £100 as a statement of your good will.
We do however note that you offer little explanation as to why our claim has been so poorly dealt with except that you have spoken to the staff involved and are arranging training where necessary. To be brutally frank this sounds nothing more than a knee jerk reaction of ‘blame the staff’ or an excuse. Having dealt with many of your staff on a day-to-day basis for some time now, we as customers feel the fault within your company lies in the fact that your staff are simply over stretched, having days if not weeks of back log at anyone time. It therefore seems somewhat unfair of you to disparage your staff and a rather hollow gesture to ourselves to blame them, however there is little we can do about that.
Moving on from your service as it is a point that there is obviously little further movement to your valuation skills of the market value of vehicles.
As you state assessing the market value of a second hand vehicle is not an exact science but we feel we must again reject your offer of £4415 as the market value of the car. We note that of the ten examples you provide only two are below the sum you are currently offering us and that one of those two we have previously tried to contact without success. You were informed of this in our last rejection letter.
We enclose 34 examples of a 1997 306 GTI 6 of varying mileage averaging to a value of £6394.
Please note examples such as: -
P Reg 72000 miles @ £5499
P Reg 80000 miles @ £5600
P Reg 70000 miles @ £5995
P Reg 59000 miles @ £6250
P Reg 85000 miles @ £6200
As you can see we do not find it difficult to prove the market value to be above your current offer.
We also enclose Glasses guide valuation of the car showing £4730 as the value of car, of course noting the disclaimer that
“Values are not cash values, replacement prices, private sales values or insurance settlements and therefore must not be used for any other valuation purposes whatsoever”

We personally prefer the current Parkers valuation of the car (enclosed) at £5435, as this seems to roughly reflect the price for which you could replace the vehicle.
Again we note that despite pointing the fact out numerous times you still offer no compensation for the loss of our CD multi changer despite our policy clear stating cover to the value of £750 maximum. Could you please comment?
We again await review of settlement of this claim, as we are still as yet in no way satisfied with Bells Directs offer.
It is somewhat ironic that Bell Direct is currently the second cheapest quote we have for our intended replacement vehicle, the cheapest quote being £1400 per year. One would assume that you are happy to lose this kind of business? Your offers certainly suggest so!
We again await your reply, please be in everyway assured that we intend to pursue this matter in everyway possible.

Regards,
Old 28 March 2003, 01:23 PM
  #10  
SULS
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I can just keep going with this

Dear Ms Griffiths

I write to again complain about the service we continue seemly do not receive from Bell Direct.
I firstly note that you have not found the time to reply to my letter of the 11th February, in which I again refuse the offer for replacement value of our car and secondly ask why at any time we have not been compensated for the lose of the vehicles stereo equipment which is clearly covered by our policy?

In addition to this we have phoned on 5 separate occasions to ask for proof of No Claims, each time to be faithfully promised that the document would be in the post that day.
We still do not have these documents now despite complaining to a manager on the fifth attempt who again assured us that she would personally tend to it.
Could you please offer an explanation for this and ensure that our proof of 5 years no claims are posted to us. Could you please also respond to the points in my previous unanswered letter?

I again enclose reference that the cars value is approximately £6000 taken from this months What Car Price List.


Regards,
Old 28 March 2003, 01:25 PM
  #11  
SULS
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As you will guess we haven't had satisfactory replies to any of our letters.

Incase anyones unsure.

DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT
DONT INSURE WITH BELL DIRECT

Hope this saves someone the heart ache it has caused us !!
Old 28 March 2003, 04:17 PM
  #12  
Fatman
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I'd have to disagree. My Scoob was hit last September, whilst I was insured with Bell. They acted promptly, effectively and successfully against the 3rd-party. I got all my expenses back from the accident, and couldn't fault their legal claims dept. Unfortunately the premium they were asking for to renew was too expensive, otherwise I'd have stayed with them.

I guess like any company, some people have good experiences and some have bad.
Old 28 March 2003, 04:27 PM
  #13  
SULS
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Alls I can say is your a lucky chap Fatman, Bell has been nothing but an on going headache for us for the last 4 months. Maybe their service has degenerated since you claimed?

I do take your point that it may be luck of the draw although it is worth noting that I wrote directly to the MD also detailing my complaints with no success.


Old 28 March 2003, 07:35 PM
  #14  
ScoobyWon't
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Angry

There is no insurance company as bad as Bell. I must have spent at least 25+ hours on the phone to them, sent over 10 letters.

They try every trick in the book to get out of paying or reducing the payment, I even had a Bell insurance investigator round twice.

Then to slow it down further they say that the other party is disputing the claim, even though tehy'd previously informed me that teh other party had admitted liability. They just don't want to pay out.

To reduce the value they send example prices such as Glasses Trade values i.e. what a trader would give you part ex against a new car. They send you examples from up north where cars are generally cheaper to buy anyway.

In the end I sent them a valuation from an independant trader who valued the car at over £1500 more than they said, threatened to go to the insurance ombudsman, tell everyone I know not to use them, and forward the complaint to the BBC's Watchdog programme. Funnily enough I got what I wanted in the end.

One simple word...

AVOID!!!!
Old 30 March 2003, 11:18 PM
  #15  
Silverman
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Thanks for all the comments people, their seems to be as many good stories as there are bad. This sort of thing rearly shouldn't happen though I have to sympathize with Suls, you seem to have had some vvvv bad luck, you would think the company would at leat be consistent. Either good or bad! Hopefully after an intence weekend of phone calls I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Old 31 March 2003, 03:41 PM
  #16  
SULS
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Red face

Silverman, I sincerly hope you get on better than we did\are .
I wont be writing off the difference until I have been down every avenue I can, it is certainly not the last that bell direct will hear from me.

Best of luck all the same !!
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