A businessman who had everything – including his passport – stolen from a hire car on the last day of a Spanish holiday says he has been left with a £1,300 bill after his holiday insurance refused to pay most of the claim.
Paul Whyte and his 17-year-old son had all their bags snatched from the locked boot after stopping for lunch in Benidorm on the way back to the airport in August. Crucially, their passports were in their stolen bags, which meant they had to abandon their Jet2 flights home.
Instead, they had to stay an extra night, drive to the British Consulate in Alicante, book last-minute peak-time flights back to Newcastle, and hire a car to get home to Glasgow.
His travel insurance was bought from an award-winning company, Holidaysafe, but says he was bemused to discover how little he could claim for. He says the company has used its terms and conditions to refuse to pay for the consequential costs he had assumed would be covered.
Whyte, who is semi-retired but still works in property, says: “Everything was locked in the boot of our hire car out of sight, and it all went. The local tourist police told us the airline wouldn’t let us fly without our passports, even though we had checked in with those details.
“We had to get back to the villa that we’d already left, extend the car hire, go to the embassy and pay £200 for two emergency travel documents – and re-book expensive flights at a cost of £440 to get us back to the UK.”
He says his total losses were in excess of £3,000, but as his Holidaysafe multi-trip policy did not include electronic items, he accepted that his son’s DVD player and other similar items would not be covered. However, he says he was shocked when the claims firm appointed by the insurer, TCF, paid out just £851 for basic items stolen but refused to pay for passports and replacement flights.
“I specifically chose this policy as it had been recommended on the Martin Lewis MoneySavingExpert website as being the best value. I have been travelling for over 40 years and always take out insurance. TCF argues that our passport and tickets should be kept in locked trip accommodation, but I had already left my accommodation and was heading back to the airport.
“I thought leaving them in a locked car was safer than risking the pickpockets and motorbike thieves that operate in Benidorm,” he says.
Emails sent by the claims handler to Whyte state that passports are only covered if taken from a “safety deposit box or your locked holiday trip accommodation”.
“We cannot see that a Fiat Panda can be classified as trip accommodation in this instance,” he was told by staff as reason to deny him further payments.
Whyte claims that the firm’s stance does not chime with its “customer promise,” prominently set out on its website. This states: “We believe we have to provide the whole package, and that means that not only must the price be competitive, but the cover provided should be extensive, the policy terms and conditions reasonable and easily understood, the customer service should be first class and, most importantly, the claims process must be straightforward and fair, with prompt settlement.”
Holidaysafe was recently named as the Consumer Moneyfacts travel insurance provider of the year.
TCF told Guardian Money that the underwriter has now decided to add an extra £500 to the payout as a gesture of goodwill. It said: “The items that are contested by Mr Whyte are beyond the terms of his policy. They are regarded as ‘consequential losses’, which the majority of travel policies do not cover.
“The underwriters, however, will be trying to address this issue in 2017 by launching a new type of product that will cover these items. This is an industry-wide problem.”
A spokesman adds that consumers who buy from comparison sites should be aware that policies will often be categorised as “good value” for a reason. “The cover they get will not be as wide as they might assume due to pressure on premium prices within this competitive market. Travellers such as Mr Whyte should always understand what they are buying before they purchase a policy,” he says.
Whyte is just the latest of thousands of holidaymakers who found that their policy didn’t live up to the marketing hype. Last year there were 2,267 complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service about declined claims.
FOS says it generally finds in favour of 48% of consumers following a dispute.
