Re: Stringer Pushing through bottom of Boat?
There's always a couple of lines of thought when it comes to a situation like this. Tracker can be dragging their feet hoping that he'll get fed up with the process and settle for less, or they are mired in so many problems, it's going to take a while to get to his boat to give him an answer.
If the second is true, then they have been dropping the ball by not keeping in contact with him in some sort of way. I mean, if a guy selling a wicket on Ebay can give me a tracking number the day after I pay for it, and I can track it online until it's reached my front door, they can certainly keep him updated either via email ( you know they have it in this day and age! ) or by phone. There should be someone on their end that is in charge of claims, and it's his job to keep the customer service up.
At the very least, the entire process for this claim should have been laid at his BainyG's feet before they even said they are going to take the boat back to the factory. You tell a guy that they have a very detailed process and moving a boat like this back and forth isn't a fast task, please be patient with us, we'll let you know when we receive the boat and when we plan to start our inspection.....a guy is going to be a lot more forgiving than if he's left in the dark wondering what the heck is going on.
Tracker has standard operating procedures for this kind of thing...they have to. The problem I'm seeing in this thread is a simple lack of communication, period. The company has to cover it's ***(ets) and do a proper evaluation and process the claim in a smart manner. That much would make sense. On the flip side, if you are going to tell a customer that they will probably be without a boat for the season because of this, then you need to lay out the options, or at least offer some. If he's on a payment plan, then I'd say at the very least, the number of months he's without the boat get taken off the loan. Otherwise, he's offered a different boat or a way to opt out of the purchase because any way you look at it, they are probably out the boat at this point anyway and are going to end up handing over another hull unless they can prove wrong doing and the customer being at fault for the damage.
Most likely, the nature of the damage is what is going to slow the process down. It isn't like the gel coat cracked over the surface of the boat, or the hull developed blisters. Physical damage makes pointing blame at the manufacture of the boat difficult as to where the finger gets pointed at.
I deal with hardwood floors for a living, and you'd be surprised at how often I get blamed for damage to a floor that I couldn't have possibly caused, or get sent out to look at a floor with a defect in it that was caused due to something outside our control. I had one in particular, when you stepped on the floor by the fridge, it would move down, but only in that particular spot. After a little bit of measuring I determined that out of pure luck ( albeit bad ), the linear joint between the two boards lined up right with the joint in the subfloor, which spanned two joists. The effect ended up being the floor literally hinged at that point when pressure was applied to it. Not much could be done about it other than shoring up the subfloor from underneath, or just leave it be with the understanding that that was the cause for the movement. Sometimes you just shrug your shoulders...what can you do at that point? Things can sometimes conspire against you unwittingly!
