Insurance - be warned

Well here’s the follow up to the sorry saga of my stolen Monster 750 Corse.
After getting a derisory cheque of £3740 less my £200 excess making it £3540 through the post from Hastings Direct, with no cover or offer letter with it, although this did arrive in the post about 3 days later

This amounts to an almost £3000 loss in less than 3 years and with the no claims loss I’ve no chance of being able to replace the bike.
I naturally turned to the broker who was Carole Nash. I told them that I believed Hastings Direct hadn’t taken into account the fact that the bike, although 2.5 years old was still ‘as new’ having only done 1700 miles, and the special dealer edition factor also didn’t seem to cut any ice. Hastings Direct asked for adverts to substantiate my claim, but I wrote back saying how can I do that when to my knowledge there was only about a dozen bikes done like that and at the time of purchase it was the first 750 and more than likely the only 750 to be so done. It was also a further problem in that with Chris Clarke’s closing I had no chance of getting any back-up letter from the dealer and originator of the work.

Anyway, we have had about 2 months of to-ing and fro-ing, and having repeated requests from Hastings Direct to supply adverts despite my writing to explain time and again I wish I could.
The big issue here is the appalling level of customer service from Hastings Direct, via Carole Nash. I was promised on 3 occasions that Hastings Direct would write to me about the matter, NO letter ever arrived. After talking to Carole Nash again, this particular time being the only time in communication with Carole Nash that I talked to someone with some customer service skills, he had talked to Hastings and left a message for one of their engineer assessors who would call me to discuss this problem.
Of course no phone call was ever forthcoming and Carole Nash have told me this morning that the reason Hastings Direct won’t up the offer is because I didn’t declare the mods.
Bo****ks I said, one of the reasons I changed to Carole Nash was to make sure the paint job etc was covered and when I got the quote I specifically told Carole Nash about the mods, and was told that’s fine and the mods would be covered.
Well it wasn’t apparently and it’s my fault for not checking the certificates when I received them and making sure the items declared were written on the certificate
At that point I’m afraid, to use a famous Geilgud line from the film ‘Battle of Britain’….
�It’s unforgivable, I lost my temper�

The sad little muppet on the other end of the line got a good verbal pasting :twisted:

So, it seems that’s it, I was going to take it up with the Insurance Ombudsman service, but I’ve just discovered it’s now defunct and there is only the general financial ombudsman service to go through

Anyway, it’s great to be wise after the event, but I urge anyone to check that any declared mods are stated on your documents, and if any one is insured with Hastings Direct or Carole Nash…..go somewhere else.....it could happen to you.

I thoroughly enjoyed my Monster ownership while it lasted, and to those of you I met through this fine organisation, and especially to Terry, Grunt and Marky for the laughs
I’ve still got an as new battery and a pair of 200 mile use only standard cans if anyone requires them.

All the best to you all, :burnout: