Travel insurance declines to pay for flight delay

Lucazade

Please point me to the right forum if this is the wrong one.

I bought tickets on Opodo for the family to fly to Spain during the Easter break. Unfortunately Norwegian Air cancelled the outbound flight at the last moment, claiming bad weather (but apparently it was an aircrew strike). What they offered was to fly three days later with overnight stay in Copenhagen, which meant we would have arrived on Friday instead of Monday. This would have left us with less than two days holiday's worth.

I tried to make a claim but the insurance company is refusing to pay: "Your policy would consider the cost of unused travel and accommodation but only if you had to cancel the entire trip due to one of the reasons outlined above(1). We note that you did not cancel your trip, your departure has been delayed for 3 days."

The reasons mentioned are:

1. Your death or Your Serious Illness or Serious Injury
2. any other cause unintended by and beyond the control of any Person Insured which is not otherwise excluded and for which You can provide Us with suitable evidence substantiating the event

Are they correct? It made no sense to me to get to destination 4 days later on a 7 days trip so obviously I had to cancel. The inbound flight was with a different carrier (BA), hence claiming from the insurance as a single job.

FutureGirl

As they were offering a flight with a different carrier, was there not an option for you to find a flight on the same day with a different carrier than BA or Norwegian, and see if they would put you on that flight instead?

Or could you have taken a refund of the flight you paid for, and then use that money to book with another carrier?

Lucazade

As you can imagine there were a lot of people looking for alternative flights and I had to queue for more than 2 hours at the help desk. By then there were no flights with other carriers either that day or the day after, the last ones gone for over £500/person with Ryanair - we are a family of 4, that's a bit too much. Norwegian offered the flight on Thursday with no additional charges. They fly from Gatwick to Malaga only once a day.

agrinnall

Norwegian's alternative, while it was perhaps a good solution for them, was clearly useless for you and you should have insisted on a more suitable alternative. The maximum delay I would have accepted is 1 day, with an overnight stay near Gatwick (I assume the cancelled flight was late in the day) and either a direct flight to Malaga or an indirect flight via say Madrid the next day. The fact that they couldn't offer you a flight on Norwegian is their problem, they should have put you on a flight with another airline.