Home warranty firm accused of not paying up when appliances break
LAS VEGAS — A major home warranty provider is under scrutiny from customers who say it isn’t living up to its promises to fix or replace broken appliances.
LAS VEGAS — A major home warranty provider is under scrutiny from customers who say it isn’t living up to its promises to fix or replace broken appliances.
American Home Shield (AHS) is one of the nation’s leading providers of home warranty plans, boasting over 2.2 million subscribers. Frontdoor, the business’ publicly traded parent company, reported nearly $1.8 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023, up 7% from the year before, and executives have touted AHS to investors for maintaining “its category leading share of warranties attached to home purchases” this year.
That’s partly thanks to a recent marketing campaign starring “Saturday Night Live” alum Rachel Dratch, which the company said has helped jolt the public’s brand awareness of AHS from 39% two years ago to 54% now. In the TV commercials, Dratch plays “Warrantina,” a sometime fortune teller who urges clients to “protect their covered appliances and home systems” from future malfunctions, like leaky refrigerator coils and broken air-conditioning fans.
But some customers say they’ve had a hard time getting AHS to respond to common issues like those. They accuse the company of failing to make good on its promise to provide covered repairs for at least 23 home appliances — no matter the age, condition or repair history — even those with undetectable, pre-existing problems.
Julian Sanchez had been an AHS customer for nearly three years when the air conditioning system in his Las Vegas home broke down in May. The company sent a third-party repair technician to inspect the damaged 15-year-old unit, he said, only to leave it in worse shape.
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