Helloooooooo Beyond!
I'm finally starting to get caught up so I thought I would take the time to write out a proper reply. I'm going to break this apart into point form:
1. Pembridge. Holy shit these guys are way behind. It's a long ass story that in the end doesn't really matter but the fact is their auto department is running anywhere from an eight to ten week lag ON AVERAGE to issue new policies and policy changes. This is definitely not normal nor "acceptable" but there isn't a whole lot we can do about it. When they quote a price that's 15% - 40% lower than market average, there's going to be a flood of new clients. The upper management (Toronto) didn't expand the Alberta staff count but the same people now have close to double the work load of 2017 and prior. It's kind of like trying to drink from a fire hose. I'm by no means defending the company's handling of this situation but it's not likely to change before Christmas. But, when they come in with a price that's substantially less than anything else in the market, most people are willing to wait.
2. Pricing in general. I've had a few conversations with individual Beyonders on this so for those folks a lot of this will be a repeat. The entire insurance industry in Alberta is going nuts on the auto side of things. In the last two decades I've only once before seen this kind of volatility and that was back in 2001-2004 before the government brought in the cap on soft tissue injury claims. That move stabalized things up until recently but starting about 18 months ago something changed dramatically. From what I can tell there are three basic things contributing to the need for prices increases in the auto product, hail / weather that won't go away, lawyers have figured out how to get around the soft tissue injury cap and the cost to repair vehicles in the average claim has gone nowhere but up.
Hail / weather - It looks like David Suzuki and friends might be right on this one, call it climate change or whatever you want but the frequency & severity of weather related events (mostly hail in Southern Alberta) has jump significantly over the last ten years and it's not going away. Multiple hail storms in the same summer is the new reality and there are costs to that which must be covered.
Soft tissue injury caps - I don't know enough about the legal system to comment with much detail but all I can tell you is that prior to 2004 it wasn't uncommon to see a $25,000 - $50,000 "pain & suffering" payout on an accident that had $5,000 in vehicle damage. The cap brought in to Alberta in 2004 put a stop to that and almost overnight the auto product stabalized and had very little price movement for about 10-12 years. Someone, somewhere has figured out how to get around this cap and we're now again seeing bigger injury payouts for relatively small accidents. It's not as bad as pre-2004 but it's a lot worse than it has been.
Average repair costs - Safety technology will save us all, right? No...lol. The statistical reality in Southern Alberta right now is that the rate of collision claim on the auto product has not decreased with all our wonderful safety nannies that exist in modern cars, it's the same today as it was 20 years ago. How do I know? Because I get to see something called loss ratio reports from all of our insurance companies every single month. They show me how many dollars our clients sent them in premiums versus how many dollars were paid out on claims and it's broken down by line of business (personal auto, personal property, commercial auto, commercial property). I can tell you that the auto product in Alberta today, as it is, is a money loser. For some companies it's by as much as 30% and I don't know any industry anywhere that can afford to run at a loss for too long. The cost to repair an average collision today is much higher than it was 5-10 years ago and I'll use my own car as an example. I've got this goofy sensor on the front of my car (Dodge so not Beyond-Baller Mercedes / BMW) that is used for the adaptive cruise control and I think maybe one or two other things. All I know as that this little thing on the front of the car is something like $3,000 to replace. So now when I rear-end someone at 25 KM/PH the cost to fix the front of my car is $8,000 instead of $5,000, or whatever it would have been for the model year prior to mine (this tech didn't come on my car in 2014 or earlier. What do you think the cost is to replace a busted off mirror on the new cars that have cameras built into them compared to the same model but five years older?
So the final word on pricing is that the entire industry is going to be raising rates, some more aggressively than others. I also don't anticipate 2019 being any different. We've more or less just finished about five years of property insurance turmoil and that side of things has seemed to settle down. Compared to 2013 the property insurance product is WAY more expensive now and has more restrictions / coverage gaps. It would not surprise me at all to see two or three years (or more) of auto insurance price increases and / or coverage claw backs.
3. Staffing. I'm not going to get into specific situations with specific people because I wasn't party to any of the conversations so I would only be getting second hand info long after something has happened. What I will say though is that if you think you've been treated unfairly just let me know. Sometimes it takes me a day or two to see & respond to PMs / emails / phone calls but unless I'm on vacation I will get back to you at some point. I'm not going to single anyone out but I can tell you with absolute certainty that more than one of the complaints in this thread have grossly exaggerated details. I'm not saying there aren't valid complaints also but like everything else in life there's always two sides to every story.
Happy Long Weekend Beyond!
Cheers!
Bill
Last edited by Masked Bandit; 08-30-2018 at 05:00 PM.
"Masked Bandit is a gateway drug for frugal spending." - Unknown303