What To Do If You Get in an Accident on Vacation
It just sounds awful to say it out loud: “What to do if you get in a car accident on vacation?” Vacation is the time to relax, kick back and have fun. Nobody wants to spend half of their vacation dealing with an accident. Good luck finding a body shop near you, that has top quality collision repair and paint services, and is affordable, especially to an out-of-towner, or in a resort town. This is, however, one of the things that you should have an idea how to solve if it occurs while on vacation. With Thanksgiving, one of the biggest travel holidays of the year, coming next week, we wanted to outline how you could deal with the unthinkable:- Don’t expect to take your car home for repairs. The insurance company isn’t paying to tow your car back home. They just won’t.
- Getting your car and any rental cars is on you. If you want to rent a car to finish your trip/head home before repairs are complete, your insurance company is not shipping your car home.
- You’re a one-time customer for this shop. Make sure that they treat you like an auto body shop near you that you trust. Driving back to the shop to get repairs made to your repairs is not how you want to spend your next vacation.
- Stay in contact with the police. Make sure that the insurance company doesn’t have to fight over a police report and that the facts are right before you leave town. You don’t want to get a ticket in the mail that you weren’t expecting, or worse, a warrant for an unpaid ticket that you had no idea existed.
- Do minor repairs at your local auto body shop. If your car is drivable, take the vehicle home for repairs. There is a level of comfort with your local auto body shop that makes it so much easier to take it to an auto body shop near you than to deal with it out of town.
- A patch job can be good enough. Talk to your insurance company. If your vehicle is not badly damaged and you can get home with just a small, temporary repair, the insurance company may let you fully repair your car when you’re back home, and allow a temporary fix at the out of town shop. If you just need replacement wheels and tires, wheel alignment, minor suspension repair, or headlight replacement, this could be a great way to go.
- Find a nationwide shop that has national warranty coverage. There are a lot of collision repair shops that contract with insurance carriers to guarantee a nationwide warranty. If you go to a shop like that, and they have a shop near you, you can fix issues that may pop up at the local branch or affiliate. The cost, incidentally, is sent back to the original shop, which would give them more incentive to do the job right, even if you’re out of town.
Tags: Auto Collision, auto insurance, Collision Repair
Trackback from your site.
