Waiting the in the waiting room.
There’s no way around it. You have an RV, you’re going to have issues. Some big, some small. If you’re traveling, you have to count on some time spent in repair shops. We bought a new RV hoping to avoid major repairs, and for the most part, we have. But even with a new RV, it takes a good year to “work the kinks out.” We bought Bessie December 5, 2014, and we had several repairs we needed to address before our warranty was up. In November, I started searching for certified Winnebago/Itasca repair shops in the Southeast. Mostly, they are Camping Worlds, which don’t have the best reputation for service. I searched near all the places we were going – Chapel Hill, Myrtle Beach, Savannah, New Orleans – and looked up consumer reviews on Yelp. Every one of them was terrible. Things like “Our worst RV service experience ever,” and “I’m so mad I can’t give zero stars, because these people don’t deserve even one.”
The only Itasca-certified repair shop we could find with good reviews was in Lake City, Florida – up north between Tallahassee and Jacksonville. It had four and a half stars and glowing reviews. We knew there would be a wait for parts, so we scheduled an “intake review” on the Monday before Thanksgiving. We would then drive to New Orleans to meet my family for the holiday, and come back once the parts were in to get everything taken care of.
Naptime in the waiting room.
If there’s one rule of thumb concerning RV repairs, it’s that nothing is ever simple. We arrived at 8:30 Monday morning and were warmly greeted and offered coffee in the waiting room. The service rep went over everything in my list and wrote it all up. Little things mostly. The stove sparker doesn’t work. The door shade doesn’t roll back up. A loose hinge. And bigger things, like the outdoor bins still leak when we drive in rain, even though we’ve had them “fixed” three times. And we have to have the windshield replaced because of a crack from a rock. (Not covered by the warranty, but our insurance covers it after a $500 deductible.)
George wrote everything up, but we couldn’t leave before a service tech had checked it all out. And they couldn’t put a service tech on it until Winnebago had approved the list for warranty coverage. We’d have to wait for a response to the email he sent to them.
We brought both Gypsy and Bailey into the waiting room and settled in for the wait. We waited, and waited, and waited. When I inquired, George said Winnebago had to get supervisor approval because even though we were under our year, we were over 15,000 miles. That there was nothing to do but wait. I tried to be Zen about the hold-up, but we had planned on starting our drive to New Orleans that afternoon. I called Winnebago myself several times, but the division that deals with customers is different than the division for dealers. Finally, at 4:30, I got a Winnebago customer rep to walk over to the other division and find out what was going on. He came back and reported that they had never received the George’s email. They’d gotten a call from him in the morning, saying he’d email the list, but it never arrived.
Glad to be back on the road.
George emailed the list again and Winnebago responded right away with full approval, but by now, it would be the next morning before he could get a service tech to look at the RV. He recommended the In and Out RV Camp down the road, which was fine, but $40.
We returned at 8:30 the next morning, and it was still noon before we could hit the road. This was a frustrating experience, but not uncommon, I’m afraid. A reminder that when dealing with repair shops, it pays to be assertive and not assume that everything is being handled for you. Apart from this delay, our experience here was good. Everyone we dealt with was upbeat, friendly, and helpful, and they felt badly about the mishap.
Gosh, I was getting stressed just reading your article until I looked at those heart-warming pictures of Bailey and Gypsy….From the pictures, it seems your little girl sure has bonded with her big brother. Very sweet.
I’m sure Gypsy thinks Bailey is her mother!
Wow, what a nightmare. We, too, have had leaky bins “fixed” several times. Mark gave up and fixed them himself with lots of caulk. It’s a recurring theme. Every time we have a repair, Mark ends up fixing the “repair” himself.
We have to visit a repair shop soon – an exhaust pipe broke and is currently held on by, you guessed it, a coat hangar. i’m dreading it – both the experience and the cost.
Hang in there – have fun with the family.
We spent our third day in that waiting room yesterday, and I’ll have another post about that later. But it was a better experience, and I do believe this shop deserves its high ratings. We just got off to a bad start. Time will tell if this bin fix actually did the trick. How’s the southwest? We’re in Orlando now and I’m loving the warm weather!