We're insured with Apia. Five months after some damage, we're still waiting to have insurance claims settled. So are many other West Australians. How do I know this?
Western Australia had a major hail storm in March 2010. Major damage all across the metropolitan area and further. Five months later and -- according to a recent newspaper report -- only half of the damage has been repaired by the various insurance companies.
Still, even in the week immediately after the storm, insurance assessors were estimating six months for repairs. WA is short of tradies, lots of them have followed the mining boom to the north of the state. Still...
We're insured with Apia. Five months later and we're still waiting to get Apia to finalise our claims. It took months of increasingly irate phone calls to get some action on one very simple item. We still have not managed to get an insurance assessor to check for damage to our roof and solar water heater.
We still don't know how much hail damage will be covered by our insurance company.
Every insurance company is -- according to the newspaper report -- in the same situation. After taking our insurance premiums for more than twenty years -- they are unable or unwilling to spend enough extra money to get priority work done for insurance claims.
So what?
In today's paper (The West, 9 Aug 10) there's an ad for Apia. "Get a quote from apia," it says, "and you could win..."They can't handle the workload for their existing clients.
Now they are attempting to buy new clients.
Really, I'd rather they spent the $25,000 prize -- and associated cost of advertising -- on speeding up their response to claims.
Yes, the hail storm in Perth was unusual. But that's why we have insurance -- to cover ourselves against unusual circumstances.
Pity the insurance companies have different ideas.
email nick leth at gmail dot com |
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