Stop flogging us worthless cover
DELAYED luggage, a stolen camera and a broken thumb just about cover the holiday mishaps where I’ve been glad to have insurance.
A few times in my 20s, I foolishly travelled without a policy. Never again. You only need to hear one awful tale of woe to realise it’s £20 or so well spent.
My wakeup call was when a family friend’s son suffered an accident on an excursion in Cyprus. The teenager and his friend were jumping into the sea from a high rock — a terrifying craze known as tombstoning.
The friend panicked, jumped too soon and the boys landed on top of each other. The family friend’s son shattered four vertebrae in his neck and was lucky to survive.
Because he didn’t have insurance, it cost the family £30,000 for treatment and the emergency flight home.
he’s since made a full recovery and they’ve been raising money to pay off the debt. Even if, like me, you have no intention of risking your life jumping off cliffs, it’s clearly far from brave to travel without decent insurance. You just never know.
Once you’ve accepted it’s an essential, the tricky decision becomes which cover to buy. The chances of having to claim are fairly low — one claim is submitted for every 50 policies sold each year, according to the Association of British Insurers. So, there’s a strong temptation to find the cheapest deal.
Comparison websites make matters worse by pushing the cheapest option. They spend millions on snazzy TV ads to ram home the message that it’s all about slashing costs to the minimum.
If you hadn’t got the message, most list the lowest prices first whenever you search for a deal.
But as we reveal today on pages 36 and 37, three in five of the policies that show up on the first page of results expose you to enormous costs. These policies are full of holes. In a rush, you could skip the first and second cheapest deals — guessing they are probably pretty shoddy — and still get caught out.
What we need is some minimum standards. Deals full of unacceptable catches, such as the excess being higher than the sum insured, should be chucked out. And when you search comparison sites, the results should be labelled clearly or split into sections.
For instance, you could have the cheap ‘bronze’ deals that do a job; recommended allround ‘gold’ policies; topend ‘platinum’ cover for everything you can imagine; and specialist deals covering winter sports, older travellers and suchlike. Many insurers already do this on their own websites.
The price comparison giants like to portray themselves as the customer’s friend. But strip away the marketing guff and the truth is they’ve done a pretty poor job of making sure people get the right deal, rather than the cheapest.
It’s time they changed their irritating tunes on TV to make it clear that price isn’t everything.
Brexit bunkum
IF YOU’RE looking forward to a summer escape to Italy or Spain, allsinging, alldancing travel cover might be a good idea. There are just 15 days until we decide if Britain remains in the EU. If you believe the propaganda, then Brexit could mean the end of free healthcare abroad, compensation for delayed flights and protection against ripoff mobile phone bills.
I’m fed up with this scaremongering. First, if we do vote Leave, it’s likely to take two years of negotiation before Britain officially quits the EU, say experts. So you can be fairly certain all the Europewide consumer protections we have today would remain until 2018.
That means up to €600 (£462) cover for flight disruption and, should you fall ill, paying the local rate for medical costs under the European health Insurance Card (EhIC). It’s bunkum to suggest that, after that, we’ll be robbed of these safety nets. The Swiss, for example, are part of the EhIC scheme even though they are outside the EU. And a sovereign British government would have the power to write rules forcing airlines carrying UK passengers to provide the same — or, whisper it, better — cover for delayed or cancelled flights. The same goes for capping mobile bills. I see no reason why British policymakers couldn’t order Vodafone, EE, O2 and Three to charge customers the same abroad as they do at home. Yes, it’s a smart idea to get comprehensive travel cover this summer — but Brexit should have nothing to do with your choice.