They’re not asking you to. There are myriad options available to you, including keeping an old phone to use in those circumstances, borrowing someone else’s and even buying then later selling a more basic smart phone to see you through.
Your implication is that hire phone provision is simple and cheap, but it isn’t - and that cost has to be paid somewhere. Your AppleCare+ cover might indeed cover it but will likely cost more than the entire cost of your FlexPlus packaged account.
Did you read the policy document beforehand?
If so, when you saw the wording which said they may be able to offer this service, did you make any effort to check your address was eligible?
Hiding behind the small print in the policy wording never holds up. Especially when it contrasts or downgrades what is marketed to you, so you don’t actually get what you’re sold.
So not only did they sell you snake oil insurance, they potentially missold it to you as something better than it was. Wow.
Caveats like postcode discrimination are supposed to be communicated to you in the same place and in the same font size as the marketing material. So many companies don’t do that though, and make up the vast majority of the complaints I take to ASA.
Your post disingenuously suggests Nationwide advertise this as a key feature of the FlexPlus insurance. They don’t. If this went to the ASA, they would have no claim to adjudicate upon.
For lack of a regulated score card of features which providers must advertise they do/don’t have, it’s bananas to conclude that something not being mentioned should be sufficient for the customer to have confidence that feature will be offered.
The only place this feature is mentioned at all is in the (well laid out) policy document.
My post doesn’t suggest anything of the sort. Let alone disingenuously.
I’m taking what’s been said at face value, having read the back and forth between the two of you, and presenting my own opinion on it. Any such suggestion is coming from you and them, not me.
You question whether they read the policy document and now state this feature is only advertised in said document and nowhere else? Meanwhile they talk about the feature was dangled over their head, only to be yanked away after reading the policy document. To me, that sounds like it must have been promoted somewhere else in the onboarding without reference to the caveats detailed in the policy wording.
Do Nationwide even provide the means to do your own due diligence with respect of this feature? As far as you’ve explained it so far, it’s sounds far too ambiguous for you to know whether your post code is excluded or not unless Nationwide tell you, or you find out when you go to claim.
In any case, @Recchan is right. Nationwide have their postcode. The customer friendly thing to do is check that and communicate it to the customer for them. Anything else is just anti-customer.
It isn’t. I’ve challenged @Recchan to point to anywhere else the feature they were unable to take advantage of is advertised. They are frustrated that they have purchased cover without researching - and are lashing out on the fact one of the features they desire may have been offered if they lived somewhere else - even though there would have been no compulsion to do so.
No carrot was dangled.
It’d be irrelevant because the situation could change between the point of asking and the point of claim. They’re not committed to it, and if the user requires it as a policy feature then clearly this isn’t a policy they should consider.
Fair cop - I’d agree that it’s not relevant to a customer who required the feature.
If the customer didn’t require it, but they did want an indication of where you might stand, a phone call would I imagine offer some clarity, but I couldn’t say with any certainty.
My question to @Recchan was intended to flesh out the reason they might feel done over - for example if they had been told they would get it, but then were told they wouldn’t then that’d represent a rugpull. For lack of any story to that effect we can conclude that hasn’t happened.
Unfortunately this isn’t a massively advertised thing. I actually got told I’d be able to when I called the underwriter to then be told when they tried to file it that it won’t go through.
As such, I’m guessing there was no reasonable way to do decent due diligence.
Arguably it is as important as any other part of the package that they’d want to advertise. I also believe they should be putting it in big bold letters that about half of the domestic phone market is going to be unauthorised and invalidate any manufacturer warranty. That shouldn’t be buried away in a policy document.
Actually, it was yanked away when I went to claim. I didn’t once for a second expect them to have an arbitrary “oh by the way postcode lottery” applicable even when I was already going to London that week.
I don’t think they know - arguably a terrible policy. I think Nationwide would be better off working with Samsung and Apple for the coverage and finding an unofficial partner for smaller brands and making that abundantly clear.
Like, when you sign up there are checkboxes. One of those should be “do you live within X miles of our partner store, we need this information because without it you won’t be able to utilise a store and this may materially affect the suitability of your insurance”.
Poor business practices is enough to feel done over. As N26 said, it’s not like they didn’t know where my registered address was.
To be fair, they send me a comprehensive letter each year describing in detail the terms of the policies. I think they have to these days since all the paid bank account mis-selling claims.
As above. They do. They also detail it in all their promotional literature, which you’re sent a copy of after you’ve applied (after which you can cancel without penalty within 14 days).
You might have to chalk this one up as a bit of a blunder on your part.
If they’d have told me there was definitely a brick wall postcode lottery, I wouldn’t have bothered. They had the information (my postcode) to do that.
You can consider it a blunder on my part, that’s your prerogative.
I’m about to switch from Metrobank to Nationwide and collect £200 bonus. My question is is it safe to use the QR code from the letter I received. With all sorts of scams everywhere I’m just paranoid.
