Stranded in Berlin
Our travel insurance let us down
When trips abroad go wrong, we don’t just face the hassle of making new travel arrangements – it can prove difficult or impossible to claim back the extra expense on your travel insurance.
I discovered this the hard way in the middle of a recent trip to Germany when, just as we were desperately trying to get home after our flight was cancelled, I realised that I had failed to tick a crucial box on my insurance application and faced being unable to claim back hundreds of euros in extra expenses as a result.
Our hurried scramble for tickets home
We were having a fabulous time in Berlin, celebrating my husband’s birthday with a surprise visit to his home town, when we got the bad news: a text from Ryanair informing us that our return flight to Stansted the next day had been cancelled.
We couldn’t simply wait for the Ryanair flight the following day because I had a critical hospital appointment on that date and our younger son had a deadline for a job application.
So we booked four seats on an easyJet flight on the day we’d planned to return, albeit to Luton rather than Stansted and more expensive than our original flight.
I assumed that our travel insurance, hastily bought online the night before our trip, would cover the extra costs of getting home. But when I called the insurer at 5pm I was told that all claims were “individually assessed” and that the relevant department had gone home for the day.
Things got more complicated when I rang easyJet to check on our flight and was told that there were none the next day. By this time the Ryanair flight a day later had also disappeared from the company’s website. The earliest available flight was now two days’ hence.
By this point we were feeling desperate to get home. My husband suggested flights from Hanover, 90 minutes from Berlin by train. This option was vastly expensive: about €650 for the four of us.
It was 2am by the time we had booked a taxi to the station (€20), seats on the train (€127) and the flight (€200) for my younger son and myself, leaving my husband and older son to take their chances on finding a flight.
So one son and I set out on a lengthy and expensive trek home involving two train journeys and a stopover in Stuttgart. My husband and other son caught the easyJet flight to Luton (it wasn’t cancelled after all), followed by a 90-minute coach journey to Stansted, where our car was overstaying its welcome.
Meeting up at 9pm that night, we all hugged like the survivors of some life-threatening trauma.
Our insurance unravels
While waiting at Stuttgart for our second flight, I had scrolled through our “Gold Select” travel insurance policy. There it was, in black and white: up to £500 cover for “travel disruption on the journey home”.
But the next day I had a horrible blow. Calling to register a claim for travel disruption, I was told that this was an optional extra – and I hadn’t ticked the box that would have added it to our policy.
I couldn’t even recall seeing the box. Feeling utterly defeated, and more than £400 out of pocket, I burst into tears. So where did we go wrong? James Daley, director of Fairer Finance, a consumer lobby group, says there is a “massive gap” between customers’ perception of what travel insurance covers and what it actually does recompense. Comparison websites are the most frequently used way to buy travel insurance, leading to a “race to the bottom” on price and a “hollowing out” of what might be covered, he says.
“Most people buy cheap cover online at the last minute, hope they won’t need to use it and don’t spend a lot of time examining it,” he says. “It’s becoming increasingly common to take benefits out of insurance policies and add them back as extras. Insurers are obliged to make that clear. If they have big red letters saying something is optional, that’s one thing. But a tick box?”
The firm I bought the policy from, Southdowns, says: “What is and isn’t included in your policy will be shown on a full results page prior to purchase. In addition, the key facts and policy wording are available to view throughout the purchase process and sent to our customers via email as soon as they have bought a policy.”
How to ensure you get the cover you need
Mr Daley advises holidaymakers to buy travel insurance early, such as when you book your flight or holiday, rather than at the last minute. “With events such as industrial action, it comes down to whether you could have reasonably foreseen it or if it has been announced already. In this case, insurers will say you should have planned to avoid it,” he says.
He adds that it is worth considering using an insurance broker to help you pick the right policy – something that many people did before the advent of the internet. “Either use a broker or do a reasonable amount of homework and check the terms and conditions yourself,” Mr Daley says, adding that insurers should have a 24-hour claims line so that people can check what is covered at any time.
“If they haven’t got one, they need to accept the consequences if people spend money without their approval,” he says.
He adds that it is unfair that some insurers have blanket exclusions on events such as industrial action, terrorism or an airline going bust. “This is crazy. Why shouldn’t these things be covered? If you’re in Paris when a bomb goes off, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect you to want to cancel the trip and fly home, expenses paid.”
Try claiming under a different section of the policy
Graham Trudgill, director of the British Insurers’ Brokers Association, says our flight cancellation should arguably have fallen under the “travel delay” part of our cover, despite the fact that we had ultimately taken earlier flights home.
“If you have evidence that the flight was cancelled and that the next available flight was more than 12 hours later, our underwriters take the view that you should be compensated,” he says.
In the end, our insurer agreed with this view. A few days after our original claim was refused, I was told we would get compensation after all, although it won’t cover all the extra costs.
‘Big red letters saying something is optional, that’s one thing. But a tick box?’