OINC travel insurance and (Travel Claims Services)

hander

Hi, Took out a travel insurance policy with OINC in the summer. And checking out, I was offered 'Gadget insurance' for an extra <£10 premium.

I normally ignore these things but in this instance, I added it to the policy - after all, as a family we tend to travel with two tablets, two phones, and various other tech. It only takes one of these to take a bad tumble and ...

And sure enough, my phone took a serious fall and my (expensive) earphones also got damaged. All accidental. All covered as far as I know.

This is the first time I've claimed on travel insurance on these kind of things for a long time. WOW! It's painful, isn't it? Apart from making the process as opaque as possible, the amount of info required incl. repair estimates, (how the hell do you get a repair estimate for some earphones?), is phenomenal. The claim has been in almost five weeks and I've just had one acknowledgement and, today, a request for further documents and, now, a request to send the earphones into them for inspection.

Basically this is going to take at least two more months, which to me is an incredible amount of time.

If this is how they process a claim for something so simple, it's doesn't bode well for a more serious claim which might have more urgency about it.

I'm starting to think that these people rely on making the process as tortuous as possible in order that you eventually give up.

InsideInsurance

Insurers are typically geared up for the most common types of claim they get and for dealing with the mid level volumes of claims.

Being at the end of the summer holidays you are going to be hitting one of the two peak of the year for Travel claims. Possessions if the 3rd category for travel after medical and cancellation/ delay and they probably don't get enough claims for headphones for them to warrant have a specialist to deal with them.

Finally, you bought from a company that markets itself as "cheap travel insurance" - cheap comes at a price, normally the level of service you get. If you had bought a premium product and received slow service afterwards then you'd have more justifiable grounds for complaint.

hander

Thanks for your reply.

Agree entirely - apart from your comment about earphones, which I didn't really understand. I've sent them photos of the physical damage. Needing to send them into the insurer adds such an extraordinary time lag to the situation.

In essence, though, yes - this has taught me a lesson about future insurance and I'll use someone bigger and better in the future.

That said, I doubt whether they would advertise themselves as incredibly slow and opaque (it doesn't take much to do a clear flow-diagram as to the procedure and provide suitable URLs to download claim forms rather than leaving me for 25 mins on an 0844 number to just read me a URL).

As such, cheap or not, I shouldn't *expect* such service!

However, this is the real world, as you imply. Pay peanuts, etc.

InsideInsurance

hander wrote: »

Agree entirely - apart from your comment about earphones, which I didn't really understand. I've sent them photos of the physical damage. Needing to send them into the insurer adds such an extraordinary time lag to the situation.

Assuming they are unrepairable then the salvage becomes their property. Its not uncommon for an insurer to request the salvage be set first before releasing funds for their settlement.