~ TRAVEL INSURANCE - Who to deal with, and who not to ~
After readin drc’s experience with TID (Travel Insurance Direct), and their lack of willingness to be civil and understanding with his situation, I thought a thread that we can all share both our GOOD and BAD experiences with Travel Insurance providers, so we can all better find that elusive all rounder that looks after their customer, and therefore makes our travel a hell of a lot easier!!!!!
So tell us ya stories or ask ya questions, peeps!!!!!
This thread’s a great idea!
I have always used TD in the past as they are competitive and have pretty good customer service, however after reading drc’s experience I will absolutely not use them again!!
I’m really interested to see who has had to make claims before and had a good outcome..
you know to be honest when it comes 2 insurance i will always pay little extra, when i went to japan i went with 1cover and to be honest they where perfect.
i dropped my camera coz of my club sines and broke the lcd scree came home lodge the form and with in 3 weeks i got the money for repair and all they asked was to get a repair quote, and that was it.
more then happy with they service and i think it costed me $110
I have used World Nomads for travel insurance a few times, and would recommend them. As far as I could tell they are one of the cheaper ones out there and were recommended by a few people to me and I think were also recommended in Lonely Planet.
I made a claim when I hurt my knee. My claim included the doctor fee, knee brace cost (as rec by Dr), and physio appointments (also rec by Dr). They paid up, no hassles. I think there is a $100 excess, but I am cool with that. I think any insurance which doesn’t include excess is gonna be super expensive.
They cover snowboarding, importantly.
Also, after using them once I receive a 5% discount each time I get travel insurance with them.
At the end of the day, they are probably nothing special but they are legit and cheap.
I should add, I never claimed for anything lost / stolen, so can’t comment on that side of things.
Yeah good thread Mizu.
Antisense I am really glad to read that. If you ever need to claim travel insurance I hope you have dodged a bullet with this one.
In case anyone hasn’t read my other thread I’ll give a quick rundown of my bad experience with Travel Insurance Direct
I purchased insurance via TID for my overseas trip to Japan. I just took the standard bundle and left it at the $100 excess (wasn’t planning on needing to claim!)
Unfortunately whilst in Japan I had a Jacket (with gloves/beanie/cash and medication in it’s pockets around $600 worth in total) stolen from a club (which was placed amongst 15 or so other jackets on a coat rack) I then spent the next few days frantically running around trying to organise a police report (which is incredibly difficult when they don’t speak english) as a result of this I missed days on the snow and had to wait around at night for a photo shoot of the crime scene.
I also spent a bunch of money making international calls back to TID to keep them updated with the proceedings and the difficulties I was having getting my hands on a police report.
When I got home I immediately sent through my claim with as many details as possible.
After quite a long wait (over a month) I hadn’t heard anything back other than the automated (just checking if you are thrilled with our service survey who never replied when I asked them to follow up my claim) I called them yesterday to check what was going on and was told I would be contacted soon.
Miraculously I received the response today outlining they had rejected my claim! 
This was the reasoning I received.
“We regret to inform you that your claim has been declined as your items were left unsupervised in a public place, you state to have reported the loss in excess of 24 hours of it occurring and you have also failed to provide a written report to support the loss.”
Now another thing to note is from what I was told (through the translator I dragged to the police station to me) It’s not possible to get a copy of the police report from the Japanese police as it needs to be sent to Nagano for a formal process which takes weeks and they will not fax/email the results.
I’m annoyed about the $600 loss and the money I spent on the worthless insurance but I’m even more annoyed about the 3 days I wasted in Japan not doing what I love but chasing up reports which proved to be a complete waste of time.
That’s a really crappy experience, sorry to here it drc.
WOW drc, sorry to hear that.
We use Snowinsurance.com which is TID and we needed help in the US when the little man knocked himself out and loss part his vision and they were absolutely fabulous. They even reimbursed us the $70 it cost to send the paperwork by fax.
the only drawback to them was that because they do not have overseas bases that you have to pay medical expenses up front and then claim it back. If we had not have had the extra funds, we would have been in a bit of a predicament.
Due to injury we were on the phone quite a bit and at all times they were helpful. My brother also got hurt in the park and his medical was covered.
Haven’t had a go, but this might come in handy at some stage or another?????
http://www.captaincompare.com.au/travel-insurance/?ccad=04059
This is gonna be an interesting thread for me as i’ll be needing some insurance next jan to canada.
Don’t know if they do well at snow, but pretty sure it was Covermore that i used when i went to China with my grandparents 11 years ago. My Grandma fell and broke her hip in some backwards inland town and we went through hell (hospital still had radiation signs all over the place, and for a bedpan we had to cut a bottle of coke in half).
But Covermore organised to have her transferred to Shanghai hospital via ambulance which was a good couple of hours away, and then fly to Hong Kong to a hospital there for surgery and she stayed for a couple of weeks afterwards til she was ok to fly back to Aus. Would have cost a whole lot of money for all that, but thankfully it came to an excess payment.
Interested to hear who the NOHE travellers went with for Travel Insurance this year.
I’m looking into it now as I won’t be using TID again out of principal.
The trick for us snowboarders though is finding one that’s covers snow sports and doesn’t get voided if you go off piste.
So far my research has revealed that AAMI, skiinsurance.com and insure4less seem to cover everything but I’ve only just started looking into it.
I’m usin Sure Save, and although their policy was dearer than some quotes I got, my agent (Deep Powder Tours) handles the claims process for me!!!!!
Last thing I want is to be tied up with bullshit when I can be enjoyin myself!!!!!
Cheers mate, a quick scan through their PDS and it looks like they don’t exclude off-piste so are worth considering.
So far my research has revealed that AAMI, skiinsurance.com and insure4less seem to cover everything but I’ve only just started looking into it.
Interesting, i use AAMI for my car insurances, might look into them.
DRC, please post back if you find any further info on their policy etc.
So far my research has revealed that AAMI, skiinsurance.com and insure4less seem to cover everything but I’ve only just started looking into it.
Interesting, i use AAMI for my car insurances, might look into them.
DRC, please post back if you find any further info on their policy etc.
Yeah I use them for my car/house insurance as well. At this stage they are the cheapest of the quotes I’ve got $150ish vs $210ish of the others but they do have a $200 excess vs $100 for most of the others.
I’ve just sent them an email to confirm off-piste/out of bounds coverage.
Sweet, thats really only $40 difference if you have to then make a claim.
I’m Sapphire level with them (2nd highest), wonder if their discounts are across the range.
thanks for the heads up
I don’t know too much about travel insurance, but here are two things that may be of interest:
1. I was looking at TID for last winter’s boarding trip as their policy looked really good on paper. I called them before the trip to see if I could insure my new boards, mainly in the event I left one in the ski/board room at the lodge and someone stole it. Apparently being in the lodge (entry is via PIN code) but not in my actual room is not good enough and they wouldn’t cover that. From what I was told, your gear either has to be in locked room where you have sole access, or it is directly under your supervision (ie. you are looking right at it) for their insurance to cover it. So I didn’t bother with it.
2. For those who hire cars, travel insurance can be a cheaper way to avoid the steep damage excess waivers the car hire companies charge.