This is the first time we have seen this, but currently if you already have an AA membership and you invite a friend who takes out an AA breakdown cover policy, you both could receive £15 in Marks And Spencer’s vouchers. Not bad to get you through this credit crunch time, especially when they currently have basic roadside assistance policies from £29 if you buy online. This of course is was only available at time of writing and you should check to see if the offer has expired.
What we are not sure about though is if you still get the online price for roadside assistance as the process requires an existing member to aid filling in the online form with their membership number. If you could get the online discount also, that would mean you could buy a breakdown cover policy for £29 and get £30 worth of vouchers back, between the new member and the existing one.
Not sure how they intend to make money doing this, but you have got to admit, it seems a great deal.
We can write all we want about the history of the Automobile Association, but often a few minutes watching a video can tells us so much more. Here is a gem of a video that charts the first 30 years or so of the AA that then was the largest breakdown cover organisation in the world, from 90 to 600,000 members.
The AA have considerably more members now all relying on a quick an effective call out should they breakdown and are still deemed to be the largest breakdown cover company in the UK and choose to use their own employed patrolmen, rather than third party garages as much as possible.
It is quiet amusing as you just can’t imaging anyone sitting in front of a camera with a pipe in their mouth, which is just exactly as the man who formed the AA does on this black and white footage. It is a bit of nostalgia, and a real find to see this footage, that reflects a motoring club rather than the larges insurance organisation it needs to be today to deliver the value we customers insist on.
They have been away since the mid 1990’s but it looks like the AA are bring back the motorbike to attend calls in city centres. The biggest change to this decision is to use Vectrix Electric motorbikes that will help do their bit for the environment.
There is more to the commitment, in that congestion is getting worse and as many breakdowns are for minor problems, such as a battery needing charging, there are many cases where a motorbike can arrive quicker, especially at peak traffic times. The AA has been providing breakdown cover for well over a century now and has seen it all using motorbikes since 1910 right up until the 90s.
The trial ran through 2008, but the AA motorbike page has not been updated to suggest if it was a success or not. The statistic they deliver is impressive reading, so there is no reason that this experiment will not work and it is unlikely that any environmental issues will go away. We have found a small video that may show how these Vectrix bikes may work with an AA breakdown cover call out.
It probably isn’t a surprise that the AA is the largest breakdown cover organisation in the UK, when you measure the quantity of employed engineers who attend call outs and get you on your way. Because of this you are more likely to see an AA breakdown cover van on the road than any other breakdown cover company as other service providers either mix their own engineers with call out agents or in some cases, all the call out personnel are in fact a network of garages.
You can’t miss the AA vans, painted in a bright orange colour that also has safety properties when parked next to roads at night with dim lighting, the AA logo shows no doubt of who is fixing that car.
The marketing campaigns on TV leave no question of who is the largest, although sometimes the adverts are a bit cringe worthy, such as singing patrolmen. The general motorist really doesn’t care whether the patrolmen attending their car could win the X factor, all they care about is, “will this guy get my car working soon”?
This blog will be about the The AA breakdown cover organisation as a whole, even though we are not authorised to do so. Sometimes we may be complimentary; other times a bit critical, but we hope a bit fair by bring offers, videos and some history. Of course there probably will not be daily news, but we do hope there will be sufficient information to update regularly.
