A hailstorm comes through on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday the roof of your motorhome is dimpled and the sidewall looks like a golf ball. Or somebody clips the rear cap of your fifth wheel pulling out of a fuel island. Either way, the first call most people make is to their insurance company, and one of the first things they are told is where to take it.
You do not have to take it there.
Texas law says you choose the repair shop
Texas Insurance Code section 1952.301 says your insurer may not limit your choice of repair facility. If you are told you have to use a particular shop to have the claim covered, that is not correct. You can bring the RV to the shop you want and your insurer still handles the claim.
That matters more on an RV than on a car, because the shop on the referral list is almost always an auto body shop. Plenty of them will take the job. Not many of them have taken a laminated sidewall apart before.
An RV sidewall is not a car fender
A car fender is a steel or aluminum panel. You can pull a dent, fill it, prime it and paint it, and the panel underneath is the same panel it always was.
An RV sidewall is a bonded assembly. A thin fiberglass skin is laminated to a foam core, and that core sits on the aluminum or wood framing that holds the wall together. The skin is not structural on its own. It is the outside face of a sandwich.
So when something hits it, the damage is rarely only the part you can see. The impact crushes the core behind the skin, and sometimes bends the framing behind that. If a shop replaces or patches the skin and leaves the crushed core in place, you get a repair that looks right in the parking lot and telegraphs through within a year, because the panel behind it is no longer flat and no longer bonded.
Doing it properly means opening the panel, replacing the crushed core and any damaged framing, rebonding, and then finishing. That is a different job from a fender, and it is the reason RV body and paint work takes the time it takes.
Cargo bay doors, front caps and rear caps are the same story. A torn cargo door is usually a core job, not a skin job.
Hail is worse on an RV than it is on a car
An RV gives hail more to hit and less to hit through. There is far more flat surface, the skin is thinner than automotive sheet metal, and the roof carries a membrane rather than a panel.
What that means in practice is that hail damage on an RV is frequently underestimated by the owner. The dimples on the roof look cosmetic. They are not only cosmetic. Hail bruising works the sealant at the seams, around vents, around the air conditioner shroud and along the edge trim. The seal does not fail on the day of the storm. It fails over the following months.
Then the damage shows up inside as a stain on a ceiling panel or a soft spot in the floor, six months later, and at that point it is a water damage claim rather than a hail claim, and the connection back to the storm is a lot harder to make.
So it is worth opening a claim on hail even when the damage looks like nothing. Get it documented while the date of loss is clear. There is more on how to tell whether your roof has hail damage in a separate post.
What a supplement is, and why RV claims have them
An estimate is written on what can be seen. On an RV, a meaningful amount of the damage is behind something.
When a panel comes off and there is crushed core or bent framing underneath, that is new information, and it goes back to your adjuster as a supplement: photographs of what was found, what it takes to fix it, and what that costs. The adjuster approves it before the extra work happens.
That is normal on this kind of repair and it is not a shop padding a bill. What you should expect from any shop handling your claim is that the supplement arrives with pictures attached, and that nobody does the extra work and tells you about it afterward.
Your deductible
Your deductible is between you and your insurer. We cannot absorb it, discount it, or bury it somewhere else in the estimate, and neither can anybody else who is doing this honestly. If a shop offers to make your deductible disappear, they are telling you something about how they write estimates.
Matching an older coach
Two things make a repair on an older RV visible, and both are avoidable.
The first is paint. The color on your coach has been fading in the Texas sun for years, so matching to the factory code produces a panel that is noticeably newer than the ones beside it. The match has to be made against the paint as it is now, and blended into the neighboring panels rather than stopped at a seam.
The second is graphics. Most RVs carry swooping factory graphics that run across several panels. If the decal is cut off at the repair and restarted, the line steps. Laid back properly, the line runs straight through and you cannot find the repair.
What we need to get started
Send photographs of the damage from a few angles, plus a wider shot of the whole side or the whole roof so we can see where it sits on the unit. If you have already opened a claim, send the claim number and your adjuster’s name and contact details.
For anything structural, anything involving water, or anything on a claim, we need to see the unit. The damage on this kind of job is almost always larger than what shows on the surface, and we would rather tell you that from the start than find it halfway through.
We write the estimate, send it to your adjuster, and go through it with you before any work begins.
What we work on
Motorhomes, travel trailers and fifth wheels. Collision, hail, fiberglass, paint and graphics, as well as the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and structural work the shop does every day.
We do not work on cars, pickups or utility trailers, and we do not do mobile or onsite body work. Everything comes to the shop in Spring.
If you are looking at damage and trying to decide whether it is worth a claim, call the shop at 346-708-4612 and we will tell you what we think before you file anything.