Discovery Insure leaves customers out of pocket after vehicle claim

I would like to give an honest opinion of my time with Discovery Insure.

While paying for insurance at a reasonable premium Discovery Insurance is great. There are cashback rewards on fuel spend which are a major benefit and in the end bring down your monthly insurance costs by a fair amount. The issue comes with the claiming.

There are no accountable people or decision makers within Discovery Insure that can assist you when dealing with a claim. My wife has a VW Caddy Life which she adores. She sadly crashed into a kerb. At first the damage did not seem to be all that bad and we thought it would be a matter of a week or two and the car would be back in service and covered by Discovery Insure. This was sadly my first mistake. Discovery Insurance does not operate the same as the usual companies.

Discovery Insure wrote the car off and basically sold our car off to some auction house in Cape Town. They quoted some exorbitant amount of around R58k to have the car repaired and was therefore deemed irrepairable. We could not believe that this would be the case. We then took our mechanic to go see the car today. He looked the car over and thought that the repair costs could not be much over R10k to have the car back on its wheels and running again. Of course there could be a surprise or two, but nothing that a few grand would not cover.

We have therefore asked that they reassess the car as it seems they did not quote on our actual car. It is almost as if they took another car with similar damage and app**** a generic quote to it. There were many items they overpriced that dont need replacing, but also glaringly obvious parts which are broken but are not mentioned within the repair quote.

This is extremely concerning to me as I get the feeling that someone is trying to make money out of our misfortune. Also the amount Discovery is willing to pay out, although not decided yet, will not nearly assist us with getting back what we used to have and are therefore forced to buy something older and cheaper if we take the payout route.

We have since asked if we can not rather buy the car back and have it repaired ourselves, but the auction house pretty much is saying we either need to pay 50% of the book value or come and bid on our own car. I find this highly excessive and unfair. I don't see how Discovery can allow their clients to be roped into this sort of situation.

Discovery as a whole cover all of our insurances. Life insurance for 2, medical aid for a family of 4, and two vehicles, and I feel like I would be a fool if I keep on paying thousands of Rands to this company expecting to be taken care of in the event of an accident or when in need of their services.

There is not much that can be said which has left me feeling as a happy customer.

Fix the ***** within your organisation