Travel insurance claim help!

bigsooze

Hi all
Had some great pointers from here in the past, and now I really need some of the expert advice lurking out there!

Just back from holiday - whilst away our villa was broken into and robbed. We lost money, ipods, cameras, clothes, phones etc. (no passports or cards though luckily). There was no safety deposit box in the villa, everything was locked in a hidden, hard suitcase. Thieves broke in through a 1st floor locked glass balcony door 12 foot high - no idea how unless they brought a big ladder - all other access points deadlocked and barred.

Insurance company are refusing to pay on 2 counts, which I'm querying as it seems unfair.

1 - In absence of a safe, insurance says the valuables should have been on our person. I have said I didn't feel it would be taking reasonable care to walk around with c£1000 in cash, plus about £2000 of valuables which are quite bulky in total - bit of a mugging magnet. I felt I took the safer option as the villa was securely locked and it took some extreme antics to get in! Most policies cover you if items are locked in your accommodation, I seem to have got the short straw ...

2 - although we reported it to the police within 12 hours, because they needed to translate it (didn't speak english) they told us to collect the report 2 days later which we did. this is when they dated it. insurance company are quibbling date and saying we needed to actually get the written report within 24hrs - but this was physically impossible as the police wouldn't!!

any ideas? didn't have any key facts documents for these policies - came with bank account - thought I'd read small print but it's all so confusing and contradictory - am now regretting that but it feels such a cop out when i think we did everything we reasonably could have done and are now considerably out of pocket.

help much appreciated!

RibAd

unfortunately those would be the 2 biggies for declining a claim - also read this thread if you haven't already:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=470694


If the evidence that you have says you reported it to the police 2 days after the incident....... then I'm afraid the only thing would be to appeal the claim.

Most stuff typically classes as valuables would be covered under household insurance...

If the insurance was with a bank account, there's a good chance there's a copy of the t&cs online on their website.

bigsooze

i appreciate they'll be looking for any way not to pay ... but we did report the theft within 24 hours, by phone as requested by the police. This is on the police report - the only thing they've left off is the actual date of the call but we can prove it from mobile phone records.

The insurance quibble is that we didn't get the report until 2 days later when it had been translated. Seems really unfair they we're being penalised when it was the police taking the time ! There really wasn't anything else we could have done to speed it up.

Thanks for the reply anyway!

Voyager2002

I think your post sets out very clearly why the insurance company should meet your claim. I suggest you put those same points in a letter to the chief executive, mentioning politely that if you don't get a favourable response within a reasonable time-frame (three weeks?) you will of course refer the matter to the Ombudsman. (In practice you would need to make a complaint to your insurer and exhaust their complaints procedure before going to the Ombudsman, but they would get the message that you are not going to give up and go away.)

A couple of points your letter should, I think, make clear:
1. the rules about keeping money either in a safe or on your person make a lot of sense for hotels, where all sorts have people have room keys. They do NOT make sense for your villa, which was clearly secure and where the thieves obviously did not have a copy of the key. Could it be that a clerk mis-understood, and did not realise that you were not in a hotel?

2. you need to state exactly how rapidly you contacted the police (include a copy of your mobile telephone bill); how soon after that you were able to tell them what had happened so that they could get on the trail of the thieves. Do you have any kind of documentation from the police, perhaps in the language of the country concerned, relating to when you informed them about the crime?

Anyway, good luck. At some point you might like to tell us which country this was, and which insurance company you used.