Stupid gecko

Posted on May 30, 2004 @ 4:00 pm

Imagine, if you will, the following series of events…

• Our car insurance expires, so we contact Geico for a quote.
• Geico’s quote for six months of coverage is several hundred dollars less than the rate offered by our previous insurance company.
• We take out a policy with Geico, paying in full for six months of coverage up front.
• All is well for approximately three months.
• After three months, we receive a letter informing us that our policy has been terminated — effective in less than one week’s time. Why? It seems that our coverage was terminated due to an accident filed a few days after our policy began. This is news to my wife and I, because neither of us was involved in any car accidents.
• We call Geico to see if there’s been some sort of record-keeping error. The customer service representative tells us that the information came from our previous insurance company, and we should therefore contact them if there’s a problem. We do so, and the previous insurer has no idea what we’re talking about.
• Geico then suggests that the accident must be on my driving record, so we should contact the DMV. We do so, and they confirm that they have no record of an accident either.
• Upon calling Geico a third time, a customer service representative informs us that it was actually my wife who reported the fictional accident to them over the phone a few months prior. No claim was filed, of course. My wife simply called up Geico one day to tell them about an accident — one that didn’t happen, mind you — in case they might want to raise our rates or terminate our policy. Also, it’s interesting to note that the record of this call only appears after the calls to both our previous insurance company and the DMV don’t pan out.
• I ask the customer service representative if we can have the accident taken off my record based on: 1.) the fact that it didn’t happen, 2.) the fact that the DMV says it didn’t happen, and 3.) my wife’s solemn promise that it did not, in fact, happen. They tell me that we’ll have to speak with the underwriters to get it removed. Unfortunately, she can’t transfer me directly to the underwriters; they’ll have to call me back later in the day (which they never do).
• Fortunately, as we are rapidly approaching our termination date, a friendly Geico customer representative sweeps in with a plan to save the day. For an additional $300, she offers to switch us to a different policy for the remainder of our six months instead of terminating the policy altogether. Then, she explains, we can sort out the mystery accident at our leisure some other time.
• I politely inform the representative that I’m not terribly enthusiastic about continuing my relationship with Geico after my recent experiences with the company. The next day, I go out and get a policy with my local State Farm office — for less than Geico’s original quote.

Now, I suppose it would be difficult to prove that Geico committed fraud, lowballed my original rate, or engaged in the good old-fashioned bait-and-switch under a set of circumstances like these. I do know, however, that I won’t be doing business with the company again in the future.

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