Well, what an eventful day.
Ok, so we get picked up by a local working for the AA at 7am. The car actually starts this time (yaay), but the gear still cannot be moved out of Park. The care and I are taken to the local garage (a peugeot garage), who say they can do nothiing. So we go back to the hotel, I pack the whole family into the rescue truck and go 40 km down the road to Boulogne, where the nearest Mercedes dealership is.
After about three hours of diagnostics, they work out that I need a new control board for the Gear Lever. Well, the part costs over four hundred pounds, and cannot be available until next Tuesday. However, the dealership says that we are "safe to drive" on to Poland (through Belgium, Holland, Germany), because we can engage the gear manually. What they mean by this is they show me a trick where you put a pen through the soft cover at the bottom of the gear lever and manually turn off the blockage. I need to do this every time it moves out of Park...ok, fine, as long as they say it's safe then we'll go.
So I pull out of the dealership, onto the French motorway, and...hrm, the car refuses to go faster than 60kph (3000 rpm in I think 3rd gear). Damn :-( I get off the Motorway and phone the AA again, who come along and bring me back to the dealership (I'm not legally allowed on the Motorway at 40kph, and if I break down on the Motorway then I have to pay a fortune to be recovered by the private company who runs the motorways, so I get recovered instead).
So we get back to the dealership, and start negociating with the AA and Mobilo life. Mobilo are offering that they can either pay for:
1) 5 days car hire, or
2) A hotel stay until my car is fixed, or
3) A one way flight ticket to our destination for the whole family, and a return ticket for me (just me) to pick the car up, with a limit of not more than £350 per person
The AA, on the other hand, are offering:
1) Up to £500 of hotel bills, and
2) Up to £1200 of car hire bills, and
3) Some amount of taxi fares as needed (don't remember how much).
Sounds great, right? Hire a replacement car, drive to Poland, pick up my car on the way back. Except that...it's impossible to hire a car in France and drive to Poland. None of the Hire car companies will allow it - period. Their insurance only covers up to the German border. What a bloody nightmare.
One option presented is to hire a car, drive to the German/Polish border, then swap into a Polish hire car, and do the same on the way back. Except that the costs of doing this are way over the £1200 limit, and I'll have to pay by myself to cover the rest over and above. No way.
Another option is to sit in a hotel in the middle of nowhere (with one year old twins and a three year old, not to mention a grump wife) until next Tuesday, and hope that they get the car fixed by then, so we can continue our journey. But for one our whole journey is only two weeks, and for another I need to be in Munich by Monday morning (I'm dropping off the family in Poland then going off alone for a couple of days). So this is a definite no no.
After many protracted phone calls, I finally get both the AA and the Mobilo Life people on a single conference call (via my mobile phone, with two roaming calls, ouch), and get them talking to each other, on the single theme of "how best we can help our customer while still remaining within our limits and rules". Here's the plan I came up with:
- Leave car at the dealers to be fixed
- Hire a car in Boulogne and drive to Paris
- Stay tonight in a hotel in Paris
- All Fly from Paris to Warsaw tomorrow
- Hire a car in Warsaw for the duration
- In two weeks, fly from Warsaw to Paris
- Hire a car in Paris and drive to Boulogne
- Pick up fixed car and go home
My suggestion was that the Mobilo folk cover the cost of the flights, and the AA cover all of the hotel and hire car. They all went off and thought about it, talked to supervisors and the like, and result - we're in a (dirty, cheap, cold, but better than nothing) hotel room in Paris CDG, with a flight out to Warsaw tomorrow. The only place where the rules were bent is that Mobilo kindly agreed to us all having return flights on the condition that they don't cost more than their limit of £350 per person. I wasn't expecting that - the AA had offered to cover the return leg out of the £1200 hire car limit - but this is even better.
I'd like to take this opportunity to sing the praises of Mobilo Life. These guys are *superb*. They keep calling to check things are OK, they go out of their way to help you, they have a great record system so everyone you speak to knows exactly what has been said before, and best of all the only cost is to have bought a car from Mercedes and serviced it at a Mercedes Garage (I have a full service history, so Mobilo applies).
The AA have also been superb, but less so at the start. It really took a while for them to get in gear - only at the end did I get one gentleman who really knew what he was doing and started to get everything working. I also think the AA advertise their service irresponsibly. I explicitly told the gentleman when I was buying my policy that we were going to Poland, and he told us that yes we would be covered no problem, and when he went through the benefits he said explicitly that if they cannot repair the car within 8 hours they will provide a hire car for the duration of our trip!
Oh well, we'll see how it goes tomorrow - nite nite.
-simon
. Glad to see the services have looked after you. 
I've not seen it happen here for some time now. I've only ever seen buggies checked in at the foot of the plane here for some time. A much better solution!
