Claim refused

meester

My insurers just called me saying they are refusing my claim.

Basically I lost my annual travel pass which cost about £3k and has 5 months left to go.

The policy document is here

https://www.cornhilldirect.co.uk/assets/home/contentspolicy.pdf

I reviewed it carefully before buying my insurance because I was worried about losing the ticket because the train company won't replace it.

Most insurers have a section on personal possessions, with a lower limit for 'money'.

The various insurers have different definition for "money".

For instance, Churchill define it as:

Cash, cheques, money orders, postal orders, current postage stamps which
are not part of a collection, National Insurance stamps, saving stamps or
certificates, Premium Bonds, traveller’s cheques, travel tickets, luncheon vouchers, gift tokens and phonecards which belong to you and are not used for business.

Thus if I had insured with Churchill, I would be limited to their 'money' limit of £300.

On the other hand, on page 12 of their policy document (above) define money as:

Money

- cash, bank or currency notes, cheques, postal or money orders, postage stamps, National Savings stamps and certificates and traveller’s cheques.

This is limited to £500.

Unspecified personal possessions are insured up to £2000 (except for bicycles and sports equipment which is limited to £1000):

Unspecified personal possessions



- clothing, baggage, personal items you

normally wear or carry (including gold and silver items), jewellery, furs, watches, photographic equipment, binoculars, telescopes, portable stereo and audio equipment, sports equipment and pedal cycles with an individual value under £1,000, which you own or for which you are responsible.

Anyway, they said that 'it is in your policy document that your ticket is not covered'.

I asked where, and she said page 12.

She then read the definition of "Money" to me. I said, "But travel tickets are not listed there, so they are personal possessions." She said "No, they are money, but because they are not included in our definition for money we won't give you ANYTHING." I told her that it is nonsense, it is clearly not money, it cannot be redeemed for goods.

I am very angry with them because on the one hand they are trying to argue that my annual season ticket is 'money' just based on their say-so, and on the other they are saying that because it is not specifically identified in their policy it is not covered.

I think this is a lot of rubbish, because they DEFINE money, explicitly in their policy. They do not say 'we will insure money, but only these types of money'. They say at the top of their policy "To help you throughout this policy, we have printed what is not covered in coloured boxes." I have gone through all of these yellow boxes, and travel tickets are not mentionedanywhere. And they really are rubbing it by refusing to cover even the £500 money limit (which I would not accept either) of the cost - they are saying if you had £500 in used fivers on your person and you lost them, they would cover them, but they think they can get away with not covering my ticket AT ALL, even though I specifically selected the policy because of the risk of me carrying arround a non-replaceable ticket worth thousands of pounds.

Anyway, I am not going to accept this.

How should I proceed? My central argument is that they are trying to foist upon me their definition of money which is different from the one in the policy, and yet that definition is not one that any reasonable person would give. I would not have a problem with a policy document that said "we do not cover travel tickets", or with one that said "money includes mobile phones and laptops". Fine. Not normal English definitions, but at least they informed you in advance.

But I am not prepared for them to tell me that "a annual rail pass is money".

To whom should I complain? To the insurance company? If that fails, is their an insurance ombudsman? Should I take them to the small claims court if they do not accept my arguments?

raskazz

Hmm, interesting one.

From reading the policy wording it is clear that tickets etc are not mentioned explicitly.

I think the insurer is incorrect, but only in the sanse that IMO a travel ticket is neither money nor a personal possession under Cornhill's definition.

The listing of items that are considered personal possessions makes it rather clear that the purpose of that section is to cover physical items with a market value. The ticket has no market value as it is not transferable. I also suspect that if you read the T+Cs of the ticket it will state that the ticket does not in fact 'belong' to you, it remains the property of the issuing company.

Personally I would try complaining to the issuer of the travel pass initially. It seems grossly unfair that if you lost a £3k ticket they will not offer a replacement, even for a fee.

Your case would be strong if you had specifically asked the insurer what was covered at inception, and they led you to believe that the ticket was covered.

mattymoo

Not honestly sure of the answer. I've had a look through the Financial Ombudsmans past decisions (contained in the newsletter section of their site) and no mention of travel permits, season tickets etc except in relation to travel insurance complaints.

However, I suspect your argument may have a major flaw. You are relying on the unspecified personal possessions cover section with its £2,000 limit.
The rail card is worth £3000 when you first buy it. As such it ought to have been specified on the policy.

meester

raskazz wrote: »

Hmm, interesting one.

From reading the policy wording it is clear that tickets etc are not mentioned explicitly.

I think the insurer is incorrect, but only in the sanse that IMO a travel ticket is neither money nor a personal possession under Cornhill's definition.

I would have thought it would be a personal item. They don't define what one of those is, but it seems to be that it should be "an item which one carries about one's person, for one's personal use".

So that would be:

your wallet (but not any 'money' in it)
your mobile phone
your travelcard
your jewellery

but not:

the tools you are taking to work for your job

"personal items you normally wear or carry "

is really fairly broad.

My travelcard has my name and photo on it, it seems quite personal to me!

The listing of items that are considered personal possessions makes it rather clear that the purpose of that section is to cover physical items with a market value.

The listing is a comma-separated list. It is not "personal items you
normally wear or carry:[defined as] jewellery, watches, etc.", it is "personal items you normally wear or carry" AND "watches" AND "photographic equipment" AND etc. etc..

To say that it is money is clearly nonsense, but as you say, is it a "personal items you normally wear or carry"?Clearly I normally carry it. Whether or not it is a "personal item" can be argued either way, but my objection to all of this is that you carefully read through the policy to find out what is excluded and it wasn't there. It's hardly as if insurers are unaware of the fact that people carry train tickets. I don't think it's reasonable for them to narrowly construct, in their favour, any particular term of the contract, when the item is very common, and they could easily define up front instead of attempting to profit from their ambiguity after the fact (something which is illegal in contracts with consumers, not sure how this applies to contracts of insurance though). People must lose tickets all the time.

raskazz

Fair points, but something that doesn't quite ring true for me is that you state you "specifically selected the policy because of the risk of .. carrying arround a non-replaceable ticket worth thousands of pounds".

So you specifically selected it to cover that eventuality but did not (a) clarify the position at the point of sale or (b) read the policy wording?

meester

mattymoo wrote: »

However, I suspect your argument may have a major flaw. You are relying on the unspecified personal possessions cover section with its £2,000 limit.
The rail card is worth £3000 when you first buy it. As such it ought to have been specified on the policy.

It wasn't worth more than £2,000 when I took out the policy. Loss occurs gradually of the item day-by-day, and this loss is not covered (so you can't claim for 'loss' of an expired season ticket). So by the time the policy was taken out it had already suffered loss of value such that it was worth less than £2k.

In any case there's nothing in the policy as far as I can see, to require you to disclose items worth over £2,000, they just say they won't pay any MORE than £2k for an item worth more than that.

meester

raskazz wrote: »

Fair points, but something that doesn't quite ring true for me is that you state you "specifically selected the policy because of the risk of .. carrying arround a non-replaceable ticket worth thousands of pounds".

So you specifically selected it to cover that eventuality but did not (a) clarify the position at the point of sale or (b) read the policy wording?

I did not clarify the position no, but I did read the policy wording. I wanted "personal possessions" cover for my personal possession, my travel card.

Most policies I looked at listed "travel ticket" as money. So I looked for one that did not. I read it, and it did not define it as money, so I was 100% confident that it must be a personal possession. It clearly IS a personal possession.

I might have erred, as I am obviously not familiar enough with the devious ways insurers find not to pay out, but all I can say is that I was totally confident that I was covered when I took out the policy, as I had read the policy document, and it actually lists the things that AREN'T covered as personal possessions. To my mind if you say "personal possessions are covered to £2,000, and money is covered to £500", you define money as x, and then you say "the following personal possessions are NOT COVERED", then anything else that is "personal possessions" is covered.

raskazz

But again, to go back to another point, is a travelcard 'personal posession'? Does it belong to you? I strongly suspect that the T+Cs of the ticket state clearly that the ticket remains the property of the issuing company.

For example, quickly cribbed from the Young Person's Railcard site:

"3. The Railcard does not become your property and if requested must be handed in to a representative of any Train Company."