On December 11, 2014, the vehicle my husband was driving threw a timing belt; he was on his way home from work at the time. I drove out to sit with him, and he called Verizon's Roadside Assistance. We live in a small town, and he was probably about 6 or 7 miles north of town on a country highway. It's rural -- nothing nearby, and it was around 4:30 pm or so when he first called Roadside Assistance (RA).
After some back-and-forth trying to determine exactly where we were, since there were no marked roads nearby and the little communities there aren't on a map, the man with RA called one wrecker company, and the wrecker refused to go on the call. He finally reached the other wrecker company, which was further away, and in a conference call, my husband explained our location. SInce this was someone local, they knew where to find us. (At no point did RA ask for GPS, which I would have sent.) He said it would be about 45 minutes, and then took us off the conference call so RA could arrange for payment.
An hour later -- no tow truck. We got a call back from RA. Unbelievably, after submitting *three* credit cards to pay for the service, all of them were declined, and the only way for us to actually get the wrecker out to us was to pay for it ourselves (with promise of reimbursement). $156 out of our own pocket, and the wrecker was FINALLY on their way -- curiously, our card ran on the first attempt. Odd, especially since it apparently took an hour for RA to tell us of this.
I'm sure you've heard "You're in Good Hands with AllState" -- not if it's their Roadside Assistance team wielding a credit card, it seems.
It took 2 1/2 hours to get a local wrecker service out to tow the vehicle -- on our dime. We were told it would take 4-6 weeks to reimburse us. My husband copied everything and sent it out the next day. It will be 6 weeks tomorrow when he mailed it.
He's called and attempted to talk to RA, but he's getting blown off. He's been told that in 10 days, someone in customer service will contact him. What? Where's the reimbursement? His package to them included a code for reimbursement, the receipt -- everything he was told to send. 10 days means 2 weeks, when you get down to it, so at this rate, they'll be contacting him 8 weeks after the incident. Now we're both wondering if we've been paying $3/month per line, just to be robbed of the tow charge we had to pay out of pocket because of problems on AllState's end.
The RA rep my husband spoke with today was passive-aggressive and not in the least bit helpful. He wouldn't even acknowledge whether a claim existed. He asked my husband if he activated RA that night so he could get a tow -- we've been paying that $3 charge every month, on multiple lines, for years. When my husband lost his cool, the RA rep told HIM to "act professionally". He left the conversation with the distinct feeling that we'll never see a reimbursement.
This, when we were Alltel subscribers and then Verizon subscribers for a total of over 20 years.
If you're considering Roadside Assistance through Verizon -- check to see if you have better options available. We will be. We have the reasonable expectation that when we use a service we're paying for, it'll actually work as promised.
Stories like this are why I pay for AAA instead of adding Roadside Assistance to any other service.
I'm most definitely NOT a VZW employee. If a post answered your question, please mark it as the answer.
I use them a couple of days ago. I broke the key to my car and I needed to have my car towed home. I live in Texas, which is about 100+ degrees so I was stranded for three hours waiting to have my car towed home, I looked at the app on my phone. It said that the tow has been completed, but no one showed up. I called the tow company and they informed me that Verizon had canceled the tow. They would find someone that could be there a lot sooner I called Verizon. The guy told me that he would call me right back which he never did. I finally got frustrated and called a locksmith which charged me $185 to make a key so that I could get home three hours after waiting for Verizon roadside service which never showed up. This is the first time Iโve ever used this service and it will definitely be the last
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