Part 6 - At The Verge of Filing a Lawsuit Against Morelo

It certainly would not come to anyone’s surprise that, after 28 days of waiting -and waiting -and waiting to receive vehicle documents, something was seemingly wrong. Indeed, when we checked UPS tracking info on the 16th of September, we noticed that our package was declared lost. UPS began an investigation to locate it.

UPS Parcel tracking screen confirming that the envelope is lost and that an investigation has begun.

I guess we all know by now what that means. If a package is declared as lost by a carrier, there is a very slim to none chance to recover it. We had previous experiences where similar investigations took up to 6 months, unluckily with no results.

Now what?

No wonder that’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we have to face the truth and act on it. 28 days have already gone by with our hands tied, thanks to a reckless employee at Morelo who decided to send those very critical documents to an address of her choice, without daring to ask for our confirmation first. Now we’re progressing towards a new chapter in our endless story…

Are we getting close to legal recourse?

Let's have a quick glance at the chronology of events:

• Mid-May: Motorhome ready for delivery.

• Mid-July: Balance paid in full. Motorhome sitting at the dealership waiting to be picked up.

• August 19th: Morelo mailed out vehicle registration documents to an incorrect address.

• September 16th: Following a lenghty "omerta", envelope is declared lost by UPS and an investigation began.

Conclusion:

We waited with bated breath 4 weeks for Morelo to send us our documents, emailed them 14 reminders in due course, received only 2 updates (rather aimed at further stalling the matter), and important documents got lost at the end, mainly because Morelo neglected to follow up on the subject. If the envelope had been sent to the correct address in the first place, we would have picked up our motorhome and started cruising long ago.

17th of September: Formal notice before legal action

Being convinced that there were no other choice left but to seek legal remedy, we have decided to give a last chance to the factory to make things right and wrote a formal notice giving Morelo 3 business days to fix the situation.

Formal letter sent to Morelo Reisemobile GmbH putting them under notice that, should they fail to provide us with required documents within 3 days, we will instigate legal action.

Lawyer’s Advice: Do not rely on e-mail communications

As we were getting ready to file a lawsuit against Morelo, we contacted a couple legal counsels in Germany to find out about our rights and plan a course of action. Most of them commonly mentioned, before involving a lawyer, that a proper notice needed to be sent to Morelo allowing reasonable time (around 1 week) to sort the issue and deliver car documents. One more important reason for the notice was, if lawyers were involved at this early stage, there would be a lower chance for us to recover legal fees.

Lawyers that we have contacted so far underlined that we should not rely on e-mail communication and that either a certified letter by post or a fax message with a witness statement (confirming that the fax message contained the notice and delivered as per fax receipt) would be needed in order to be admitted in court.

One of the counsels especially suggested the fax method claiming that sometimes, to buy extra time, recipients tend to refuse delivery of the letters when they see the name of the sender on the envelope.

We took counsels’ advices and decided to send Morelo a fax notice.

On our fax message, we emphasized that aside from legal redress, we would seek remedy before European Consumer Center and other regulatory bodies.

ECC has great resources on how to avoid/resolve disputes, click HERE for more information. You may also want to visit German Consumer Center website.

Formal Notice sent to Morelo by fax on the 20th of September.

If this notice would not work, our last resort would be to retract (Rücktritt) from the contract and request a full refund from Morelo.

There's not much left to do but to hope that Morelo will finally take this problem seriously and act on it within deadline to sort it out...

Do we regret having paid in full?

Awkward question, isn’t it?

As we have mentioned on previous posts, Morelo had asked for final payment before delivery. Our initial intentions were -as a sensible customer- to first inspect/test the motorhome, have problems fixed, then pay the balance and pick it up. This is normally how RV dealers operate in Germany.

When we were unable to pick up our motorhome due to our prolonged business abroad, Morelo wanted to get paid regardless of the handover date and offered to store our motorhome until delivery. My brother in law has a very good heart and made a huge mistake by paying the balance in full despite the fact that I advised him to retain 10%, just in case.

I think I should have insisted more!

Once paid off, you -the dear customer- become an X digit number in their portfolio of thousands of clients. Considering Morelo Reisemobile’s high momentum (300+ motorhomes produced every year - some dealers even claim they produce around 400 motorhomes!), why on earth would they give a damn about you or me?

Thought experiment: Correlating current "level" of service to Aftersales

We have been literally BEGGING the factory for weeks to handle a simple document problem so as we could register and pick up our motorhome. However, they have been overly reluctant to lift a finger for that end.

Now let’s imagine that we took delivery of our motorhome and had an issue with -say- an air conditioning unit. Truly, having witnessed this attitude towards a (foreign) customer, what are the chances that Morelo will fix our problems?

I guess we’ll soon witness this for ourselves and share our experience in detail with our readers…