AA RAC

The AA or the RAC?

The AA and the RAC are the two largest breakdown cover companies in the UK, so you are probably wondering which one to choose. There are other companies that provide breakdown cover other than the AA / RAC, such as Greenflag and Rescuemycar.com.

All of these companies offer a variety of breakdown cover policies, starting from a simple service that will only help you restart your car if you are stranded, right through to a full policy that will take you and your broken car home and pay for any accomodation and other travel expenses that you may incur.

The AA

The AA(The automobile association) is one of the oldest car breakdown service, and was founded in 1905, originally it was setup to help motorists avoid speedtraps and didn't start offering breakdown recovery until 1949. That is over 60 years ago and so the AA should have a lot of experience with sorting out car breakdowns

The RAC

The RAC was (Royal Automobile Club) was founded even earlier than the AA, in 1897 with the express aim of offering roadside assistance, so it has more experience in total of providing breakdown cover when compared to the AA. The RAC has over 2000 vehicles and attends millions of breakdowns each year, and does offer cover in Europe as well via RAC Europe.

Choosing between the RAC and the AA

Choosing between the RAC and the AA is incrediably difficult, both of the companies offer comprehensive breakdown cover of all shapes and sizes, and both offer excellent customer service. In addition there is a lot of healthy competition between the two companies so they are always extremely competitively priced. Your best bet is to look at exactly what sort of cover you want from each company and decide based on overally pricing. Another factor in choosing between the AA and the RAC may be what sort of deals are available at the time or whether you get additional points or rewards for choosing one over the other. For example in Aug 2011 you can use Tesco clubcard points you can get RAC cover for a lot less than you would normally pay, whilst the AA offers a credit card reward scheme that gives you money off AA breakdown cover amongst other things.

Services offered by RAC and the AA

Both the AA and the RAC have a whole host of services including car insurance, credit cards and car inspection services. Both offer services to help you if you have put the wrong fuel in the car, they both provide traffic reports and they both offer travel advice, route finding etc. Infact it is hard to find something that the other company does not offer. Perhaps the only difference between the AA and RAC is that the AA offer data on fuel prices.

Both the RAC and the AA call centres are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The RAC and the AA both seem to be branching out into other financial services such as home insurance, home loans, savings accounts and even travel money.