Green Flag excellent!

[MowCopKen]

We had a problem trying to leave a CL at the weekend. I hitched up, but when I drove off, the brakes were sticking. I reversed, thinking this may help release them and it seemed to a little. However, I wasn't comfortable, so unhitched and tried the mover, thinking if the brakes were locked on, it wouldn't work. It did work, so hitched up again. I then noticed the ATC light wasn't on. Drove slowly off site, but the caravan didn't freewheel, so stopped and phoned for assistance.

Chap arrived and, although he hadn't heard of ATC, he read my manual and checked all electrics. A fuse had blown in my car and power wasn't getting through to the pin, so ATC wouldn't switch on. He put in new fuse, ATC powered up and then all ok. I didn't know that you should switch off engine when connecting up electric and this is probably what fused it. Letter of praise sent to Green Flag!

 

[Icemaker]

its good to hear this story, ive just joined green flag with full european cover as my wife and myself have just purchased a small holding with barn to convert in france so my car will be doing a lot of miles back and forth to do the renovations. obviousley ive not had to use them yet but i did do lots of research in to the various breakdown providers and green flag seem to tick all the right boxes.

 

[Guest]

Ken, I do not want to pour cold water on your story. You got great service from your Green Flag mechanic. However, you really can't say "Green Flag" are excellent because you had a good experience with one mechanic. That particular Green Flag mechanic was excellent for sure but breakdown services are only as good as their individual mechanics...there are good ones and bad in all the services. In my experience most of the mechanics with most of the breakdown services are pretty good. Haven't really heard anything bad about any of the big ones.

I am glad you had good service from your Green Flag membership.

Anyone had any bad experiences where the mechanic hasn't been helpful? I am not talking about where they don't fix things... that will always happen when trying to fix stuff by the roadside... but where they have been unhelpful or unwilling to give you the help you needed.

 

[MikeA]

Paul,

"...but where they have been unhelpful or unwilling to give you the help you needed."

Not sure if it fits your category but we had a less than ideal experience with Green Flag and a Volvo dealership in France earlier this year. Our XC90 had a gearbox failure in May (solo, on a trip back from Spain) and it was recovered to a Volvo main dealer in Rodez. After a day of no news, it was reported back to us that the dealer's only Volvo trained mechanic was off sick!

I should say that this feature apart, Green Flag did not start off the whole incident with very good performance, but recovered somewhat in the face of a number of obstacles. A very, very long story but we eventually got the car back to the UK about a month later where it was fitted with a new gearbox under warranty by a UK main dealer. The whole incident was closed eventually in September when Green Flag paid for a body shop to rectify the damage that was done to the car somewhere between Rodez and the UK.

Green Flag did admit afterwards that their service fell below the standards they set themselves, apologised, made a compensation payment and convinced me certainly that they did care and were trying their best.

Cheers

Mike A

 

[Oldsalt49]

Lets get one thing straight, although you may be a Green Flag member, like the UK, in France or anywhere else it is a local garage or recovery service that appears on the scene. Green Flag does not have its own fleet of vans or recovery vehicles, that is how they keep their prices down. It seems to me people only reply to posts on here with negatives. Ken's post was put on to show that the mechanic that turned up for him, had a bit of additional knowledge that he was able to use to get Ken on the road again.

I think that Paul can not blame Green Flag for taking his Volvo, it was the fault of the breakdown service that turned out for him in France. Green Flag in those situations sub-contract the job out.

We can all make a list of bad stories, and neglect to relate the list of many thousands of good ones.

 

[otherclive]

While I agree that Green Flag did well in sorting out Ken's car, you cannot just absolve them of their responsibilty when a breakdown occurrs overseas. Surely they have a responsibilty to ensure that their sub-contractors excercise due care. Howver I do recognise the sheer practical difficulty of so doing over an area as large as Europe. Seems to me that compared to two of my friends who had bad experiences with Britannia and AA whilst in Europe Green Flag did reasonably well and acceppted their responsibilities to Mike A which is more than Britannia and AA did for my friends.

 

[Brailleman]

Lets get one thing straight, although you may be a Green Flag member, like the UK, in France or anywhere else it is a local garage or recovery service that appears on the scene. Green Flag does not have its own fleet of vans or recovery vehicles, that is how they keep their prices down. It seems to me people only reply to posts on here with negatives. Ken's post was put on to show that the mechanic that turned up for him, had a bit of additional knowledge that he was able to use to get Ken on the road again.

I think that Paul can not blame Green Flag for taking his Volvo, it was the fault of the breakdown service that turned out for him in France. Green Flag in those situations sub-contract the job out.

We can all make a list of bad stories, and neglect to relate the list of many thousands of good ones.

Green Flag do have their own vans, I saw one only yesterday assisting a breakdown near York.

 

[Steve L]

Here's a completely different take on this subject, because I don't belong to any recovery service at all.

For 33 years I have subscribed to my policy of servicing the car myself and getting to know what's under the bonnet. Now as a qualified engineer, I have the educational tool box to do that, and I appreciate that not all of us are born with a golden spanner in our mouths and christened with a haynes manual.

I'm now at my half century and getting a bit knackered by arthritis so i have started to contemplate joining a rescue service.

Green flag looks a good deal to me as they actually franchise out the service to established and assessed garages who are predominately smaller family businesses where the true value of customer service still holds water. Also the smaller businesses employ mechanics and not fitters. The difference being a mechanic has to figure out whats wrong and has the experience/knowledge to fix it.

Mike had a bad experience as he was let down not so much by green flag, but by the fact that the nearest volvo repairer only had one volvo trained mechanic. His particular car had a gearbox failure that ended up being replaced under warrantee as there was eveidently a manufacturer related fault.

Looking at the figures Green Flag fix 86% of cars at the roadside. The remaining 14% had to be towed to a garage for repair. Probably half of those got going the same day and 99% of the rest were fixed the next day if the parts were available. That leaves Mike's ordeal which no doubt was most frustrating and time consuming as he had to have a long distance european recovery and a manufacturers warrantee repair. No doubt though he would of been given a courtesy car to use and as he pointed out been compensated for all the issues.

I would rather that than what I experienced in our company van. The AA towed us back to base after having to wait over 2 hours for a truck big enough to carry our 3 ton van. They had to swap us to another recovery truck twice as the driver's hours were up. All of this was for a journy from Oxford to Hereford. We then had to rent a van, change the tools over and drive back to our work site just 20 miles further down the road. But because of "terms of contract", they could not of towed the van to our site instead. The van was not fixable. We found one piston from the engine on the road!!

We still had to tow the van to the scrappy ourselves anyway.

Steve L.

 

[MikeA]

I think it might be useful if I try to clarify my earlier post, which I had kept deliberately short of detail because it was not quite on the point of the question being posed. However having re-read it and some of the later postings I think more detail is in order - but please forgive me because this will be a long and perhaps boring posting so please bear with me.

Let me start by saying this is not a Green Flag bashing - I think they are a good firm, providing a good service. I just think they hiccoughed a bit in our case.

As I said earlier, our problems started when travelling solo back from Spain. Four people in the car and a LOT of luggage (so much so that rear view was only by the wing mirrors - thankfully Volvo provided a safety net between the boot and the cabin space for our XC90 when we bought the car). Just after passing over the Millau bridge the car ground to a halt.

I rang Green Flag and they advised that as a first step we had to get ourselves off the autoroute using the emergency phone system at the side of the carriageway as French autoroute regulations prevented them from rescuing us from there. They said we would be charged but Green Flag would refund the cost later. We were to call them again once we were safely off and they would then deal with us properly. Fine, we understood that and used the emergency phone to arrange to be taken off the autoroute by the locally arranged recovery firm that had a contract with the autoroute syndicate. No problem and an hour and half later when we were sitting outside a little garage just off the autoroute we rang Green Flag again. They said OK, we'll get your recovered to the nearest Volvo dealer and put up for the night while they look at the car. They stressed that unlike the UK where they had contracts in place with the recovery firms, they could not guarantee a one hour response time - a perfectly understandable point.

However a couple of hours later, getting near 6 pm we thought it might be a good idea to ring Green Flag and check on progress. The astonishing response was to be told that the person who was dealing with our case had finished for the day and gone home but had noted on the computer that their recovery firm had a "technical problem" so would not now pick us up until the following day! I asked whether they had planned to leave us at the side of the road overnight without calling us, but didn't get a reply. I remonstrated that this wasn't good enough and they rang back a little while later to say that we would be picked up after all. Sure enough, about 15 minutes later the firm with the previous "technical problem" picked us up and took us to the nearest small town, Severac-le-Ch

 

[Pat_374304630]

Good morning,

Before the company was called green flag, i think their name was national breakdown. That's how long I have been with them. I can only speak for myself and family. Over the years myself and my children have inevitably experienced vehicle breakdowns. Everyone who has come out to us have been great. My son is profoundly deaf but even he was well looked after by the mechanics.

I have to say that me and my family have peace of mind with green flag.

 

[Susan_374527405]

We have used Green Flag on and off for our family over many years and been very satisfied. When we bought a caravan in May this year we changed from RAC (free with insurance) to MayDay to make sure we were fully covered for all eventuaities (CC car insurance and CC car insurance). Returning to Lancashire from a 3 week holiday in Devon we had a 'snake' on the motortway, bumped into a lorry and overturned the caravan. We spent 2-1/2 hours on side of motorway phoning all three insurances. We were told by MayDay that we could be charged for heavy lifiting equipment to move the caravan which obviously was an unknown quantity. The Highways Agency eventually removed car and caravan to a depot in nearby Wolverhampton, and dropped us off at a train station and we had to make our own way home to `lancashire. The following day we had to hire a van and drive back to Wolverhampton to empty the wreck of the caravan and car, then return home to empty the hire van in order to return it first thing next morning. We were absolutely shattered.

My point is that we thought we had covered ourselves for anything that could happen, but if you have an accident, you are not covered to have your caravan taken to a repairer near your home, nor are you covered to be taken home. After the trauma of an accident, a couple of hours stranded on the side of the motorway the last thing you want is to have to try and gather some of your belongings, and dog, and travel by train. Probably like us, others won't realise this until it happens!

 

[Barkas]

I was a green flag and AA cover mechanic for 6 months during 1998,...NEVER AGAIN !...to old now anyway... I covered the Carlisle to Penrith M6 section and immediate outlying area. After 6 months i quit due to the abuse from Joe public,... threats of assault,...drunk drivers sabotaging their own cars in pub car parks so they can get carried home...the driver who assaulted me after i refused him service because his car was untaxed (AA company policy)... some women drivers who seem to think all mechanics are out to rip them off and fly off the handle and become very aggressive because they think thats the best way to deal with men when they hear the bad news as if your personally making financial gain from their predicament....drivers that tell you lies when they know fine well that they have just boiled their engines or ran them low on oil and dont tell you because they hope your gonna turn up and say...."its just a wire off mate!!!" when in fact there's a con-rod sticking out the engine block,....and thank you to the 19 Pakastani gentlemen who were crammed into a 12 seater mini bus who verbally abused me and reported me for refusing to tow their vehicle with them in it along the M6....and thanks also to the police officer that slammed into the back of my breakdown truck in a police car who then got a following officer to breathalise ME...but NOT the offending police officer.For me, the final straw came in the shape of a driver who had locked his keys in his vehicle at a services car park at 3am on a stormy November night, I got out of bed,tucked the wifes sheets into her, sneaked downstairs so as not to wake the children glugged down some coffee and set off the 20 miles to his location and duly turned up, got him to sign a damage disclaimer(company policy) as I was about to force entry with a special tool which can scratch paintwork and or damage the door glass when your using it in the dark and rain...he signed, I forced entry, he was well pleased and sped off into the night a happy chap...until 7 days later when he phoned company HQ and said that I had left marks all over the side of the car and that he never gave me permission to force entry and that I had fraudently signed the disclaimer...and wanted a complete respray as compensation. In my experience, its FAR worse working for one of these companies than it is to receive there service,I enjoyed helping people but after 6 months with Green flag and the AA serving Joe public, I found I had become too much of a pessimist to carry on.