This insurance is only worth it if you are fairly sure you will not need to claim. Certainly, now that Nationwide is cancelling the interest on the current account, I would not touch this with a barge pole.
Here is our experience. In June my wife fell and broke her arm in the mountains in Austria. She was helicoptered off the mountain and treated efficiently and kindly by the helicopter people and by the staff of Innsbruck Hospital, but we obviously occasioned quite a lot of expense in the form of bills that were sent to our home after our early return, midway through a two week holiday. I contacted Nationwide's emergency service while in Austria and they arranged an early flight home, an extra seat beside my wife on the plane, so her arm would not get knocked, and assistance at both airports with our luggage. Pretty good really.
But there were some early warning signs. Nationwide never once contacted me by phone or e-mail to give me information; so we were left on tenterhooks for some time about whether the flight home had been booked or not. Actually, my holiday company Inntravel were much more helpful and hands on. Indeed it was Inntravel that provided me with the details of a flight home and a contact at Inghams with whom to book it - information which I then passed on to Nationwide. While Inntravel contacted me to ask how things were going, there was no such contact from my Insurance Company, who never voluntee3red a single unsolicited communication. I always had to ring them. Not only that, but every e-mail they sent me while we were in Austria included the words, "We have been trying to contact you without success." This added to the stress because we imagined that they were trying to communicate important information that wasn't getting through. I only realised that this was a lie, when we got home and all e-mails continued to contain this line. What sort of company begins every e-mail to its customers with a lie? Of course, what they were doing was lazily re-using old-mails as templates - which sometimes resulted in miscommunication bordering on incoherence.
While at home we got 5 bills. I paid one for a small amount with my credit card, but the others I forwarded to Nationwide for payment. Sending stuff to Nationwide is difficult because they use an ungainly link which occurs in one of their often mildly irrelevant e-mails about "trying to contact you without success". This works ok when you have everything to hand, but falls down when you get bills arriving in dribs and drabs, because the link disappears ever time you use it; so then you have to ring them up and ask for another link to send them the next bill, and then of course they send you another e-mail telling you that they have been trying to contact you without success.
All of this would have been only mildly annoying if they had been paying the bills that we had been dutifully and promptly scanning and forwarding. One bill from the Innsbruck Hospital was followed by a reminder and an additional administration charge. I rang Nationwide, got another link and forwarded it. Then we got another bill, the same one again with an admin charge added and 4% interest, and a threat that they would be sending debt collectors. This was adding to the stress felt by my wife, whose recovery was going depressingly slowly.
Unfortunately, ringing Nationwide about a problem is as bad as ringing Virgin about a faulty telephone line: you never speak to the same person twice, you always have to explain everything all over again, the person you speak to sounds competent and professional - and then nothing happens.
A sum of money appeared in our bank account recently. We believe this may be in settlement of our "curtailment claim". We have received no communication from Nationwide explaining what this sum is for, or how it was calculated. Each week we ring them and ask for a written statement of what bills have been paid - just for our peace of mind- but nothing happens.
John Pye
Yorkshire
Reviewed on: 24th September 2019
