Can’t say I’m looking forward to trying to unpick all this and get any monies back. Leaving it until the week before.

@BillMC i’d check your policy as you will normally be required to do waht you can to mitigate potential losses ie if you know your trip isn’t / can’t go ahead cancel at earliest available opportunity to get maximum refund. if you leave it to last minute and therefore no refund available, insurer could take the stance that you haven’t tried to mitigate loss and their position has been prejudiced as a reult. if in doubt, speak to you insurer / broker

On a vaguely related aside…

Flights I had booked for late August now cancelled.

Looking at the practically of rebooking BA, business makes the bike easy in luggage allowance, allows flexibility etc.

Yeah, no refunds even on business now.

They have paid out a lot in this round, they will up the stakes to cover themselves against the next thing!

Genuinely interested in how people got a payout on insurance during the pandemic. My own [bitter] experience is that the majority of underwriters are trying their best to avoid paying out anything since:

– Cancelled Flights should be refunded by the airline. (agreed)
– Many policies limit ‘Travel Disruption’ cover to around £1k and that itself is limited to ‘unrecoverable’ costs – which means the onus is on you to try and recover the money paid. Even if you can’t recover it, the underwriter can say ‘well you should be able to’ so can seemingly refuse to pay out!

If you elected not to go anywhere due to COVID-19 then that’s disinclination to travel which isn’t covered (FCO advice is Travel Disruption – see above).

Re-reading through my policies it transpires that the ‘cancellation’ cover actually only provides full cover in a limited number of scenarios – namely your own death or serious injury, jury service or an aircraft crashing into your home etc. The policy itself was quite cleverly worded so that when initially reading through, it appeared I was covered for £5k cancellation when in actual fact it was only £1k travel disruption in this situation – so the one time I try and claim they are digging their heels in!

So with hindsight, for future trips I will take out cover for medical/repatriation only if possible.

And use some or all of the following:

credit card to pay for holiday/flights etc
ATOL/ABTA registered company
cross my fingers that nothing goes wrong

Holiday Insurance companies have been added to my list of organisations to try and avoid using in the future.

Of course their is an element of ‘Caveat Emptor’ and Read the Policy properly and then read it again.

As a positive note, when our snowboarding trip to Italy was cut short when Aosta valley closed and we were repatriated at very short notice. However Crystal/TUI (ABTA) refunded us automatically for the week we lost. Massive thanks to Crystal. So lessons learned and all that …