First time broken down abroad. (1 Viewer)

[pagey]

Pleased it all went well

 

[jezport]

Its strange to take so long for a Ford part. Last time I needed a major Ford part I was told it would be at the dealer next day no matter what the part was.

 

[Sunnyb]

No we haven't completely disappeared, just been waiting for something to happen. Not that much has happened other than a lot of waiting, however we do now have the authorisation for the repatriation signed off and an estimated return date of 16th October. As I said earlier, the first part - recovery to the garage, hire cars, getting us home - all went very smoothly but it has now been 4 weeks since the van was taken to the garage and it hasn't yet moved. Reason given is a backlog of vehicles (probably mainly cars) awaiting repatriation. Anyway we won't pass final judgement on the overall service yet until the van is actually back but I did say to the recovery people on the phone the other day that if we had been told there was a backlog of this extent at the time we were asked to choose between repatriation and repair at garage/return to collect then we may have gone with the latter. To not tell us that isn't fair and the chap agreed. 5 minutes after coming off the phone the authorization text came through. It's like waiting for a long lost child to come home ... will update further once he's home!

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[Scotch mist]

This was me 2 weeks ago in France ,Fiat comformattic gearbox stuck in 4th gear , the MH is only 4 weeks old
So under fiat warranty, the breakdown recovery was with the RAC who were great , took us to the fiat professional garage , garage initially said 15days to look at it , one hour later it was 5days , ended up being
2 day to completion, ( loose wire to speed controller) in that time they had put me up in a hotel & unnecessarily flown the wife home to Scotland, RAC were pretty good / Fiat were poor , big downside was I had to do the last 800miles on my own
S

 

[Sunnyb]

As you may have picked up from another thread our van finally arrived back at the garage for repair yesterday. You will see from our last post on 2nd October that we were expecting it back by 16th Oct at the latest but our hopes were dashed again.

We are delighted to have it back and the mechanic has said the magic words 'quite easy to fix' so even better. We have raised a complaint with Nationwide about the delays and lack of communication during the repatriation period. We will see how that goes but if we get a reasonable response and they don't increase the monthly fee for the packaged account we will probably stick with them as now we know the cover works! However, if it ever happened again we would have the repair done out there and go back out to bring it home ourselves.

A big shout out to Pearce Recovery and Breakdown Service from Leighton Buzzard which was the company at the bottom of the sub-contracting chain and driver Stuart who actually went out and collected the vehicle and brought it back to us. Their service and communication was by far the best throughout the whole repatriation process so thanks to Hannah, Sue and Stuart. If you ever need recovery from abroad give them a look-see.