Insurance for the naïve - French or English?

[Rosyposy_2001]

Can anyone please tell me whether they have found it cheaper or more beneficial to insure through an English rather than French insurer? Also whether anyone can admit to being as naïve and careless as we were!

We purchased our holiday cottage in June, but because of a contractual letting agreement which the previous owner had, we did not occupy it until September. The bulk of our possessions were not taken over, or purchased in France, until November. To our horror, on our next visit just before Christmas, we discovered that our cottage, and the 2 opposite, had been broken into and about £1000 worth of items, mostly brand new bedding, towels and cooking utensils and new portable cd player and vacuum cleaner, still in their packaging, had been stolen. Sadly, a Lloyd Loom linen basket, a wedding present to my mother 60 years ago had also been taken, presumably just to transport the spoils, and to me this is irreplaceable. Fortunately only a small amount of physical damage had been done to the property itself. The gendarmes told us that it was most likely done by Eastern European "travellers" taking items for their own survival, plus a few luxury items to sell-on. This is apparently not uncommon.

I telephoned the French insurance company, confident that our home and contents were well covered as we are paying almost 3 times as much as the previous owner, but after listing everything we could remember to be missing and sending all the receipts we could find, we were shocked to find that we would get absolutely nothing as we are not covered for Theft! Yes, with hindsight I know we were crazy not to read the small print thoroughly, even in French, but we took on exactly the same policy as the previous owner, and after all the stress on the day of signing the Acte de Vente (that's another story I won't go into here!) it got put aside and was one of those jobs we were going to do over Christmas. It never occurred to us that Theft would not be automatically covered, nor did we dream that our precious little cottage would be burgled within a couple of weeks of moving our things in! Naïve, but there it is!

I have contacted our French insurers with a view to upgrading the insurance, but for future years wondered whether anyone had had a similar experience or could tell me on which side of the Channel they had found the best value insurance. I like to "buy French" wherever possible but in this instance I am very much open to suggestions!

Thanks

Rosemary

[Jeremy]

Dear All,

Sorry to hear of your dilemna, not a good advert for France.

The problem also being that thieves will target holiday cottages out of season as they are a soft target..

Insurance wise; we took out French insurance, used a UK speaking broker year 1, then year 2 got better cover from a French company at 25% cheaper....

Same as UK really; shop around...

Happy hunting, Jeremy

[Moulin]

Our insurance is through Credit Agricole – Britline, may not be the cheapest as we haven’t shopped around to find out but no dodgy small print and convenient as it’s all done in English.

The only problem we had was when our trailer full of sand was stolen off the drive, (the sand was found dumped in the road about 200m away where the Gendarmes think the trailer was loaded into a horsebox after horse thieves were frustrated by security at the farm up the lane,) even though the trailer was on our property it was not covered as it was not locked only hitched to the car! The car insurance, Tesco, would not pay out saying they only covered it for ‘road risks’ not theft!

Live and learn.

[Rosyposy_2001]

Thanks for the advice, I will look into Britline for the future, although when we arranged our insurance through the bank, (simply because the previous owner had the insurances for all his holiday lets there, and he came with us so he's as amazed as we are that we weren't covered for theft, guess he was just lucky nothing happened while he owned it!), we were dealt with by a very helpful bilingual bank clerk who deals with all the English customers. Obviously we just did not check that he understood exactly what we wanted from the policy and it just didn't occur to us that theft wouldn't be covered. As you say, live and learn!

Sorry to hear about your problems, Moulin, as someone else remarked, it makes you wonder exactly what you are paying for doesn't it?!

I actually put this on the wrong forum so I reposted it on the "Legal" one and got some very helpful replies, in case you are interested for future reference.