Holiday heartbreak

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Updated: 06:49 EST, 30 November 2004

A BEREAVED woman has been left nearly £2,000 out of pocket by insurers after her father died from a heart attack and she cancelled a dream holiday.

Vanessa Thorn was due to travel to Malta in August with her daughters Rachel, 15, and Amy, 12, when tragedy struck the day before she was due to fly out.

She cancelled the trip to be near her distraught mother. But now Co-op is refusing to pay out for the cancellation.

Mrs Thorn, 37, says: 'We were going out to Malta for my brother's wedding, but obviously had to cancel. I had bought the travel insurance through the Co-op at the same time as my holiday.

'The insurers now say that they will not pay the claim because my father had a pre-existing condition and I had not declared it when I bought the policy.

'But I was not travelling with my dad, and nor did I know all the details of his heart condition.'

Yet although Mrs Thorn was unaware of her father's heart condition and that it might have an impact on any claim, the travel insurers demand to know the health not only of people travelling on holiday but that of a wide range of family members.

And if you don't know their medical history, or forget an incident that might have happened several years ago, you

might not be paid out if you are forced to cancel or curtail a trip because of their death or ill health.

A spokesman for Co-op Travel Care says: 'The policy clearly states that it contains exclusions relating to persons who are not travelling but on whose health the trip could depend.

Mrs Thorn, from Enfield, Middlesex says she is now considering taking her case to the Financial Ombudsman to recoup the £1,800 the holiday cost. The Ombudsman takes a dim view of insurers trying to wriggle out of paying such claims.

Spokesman David Cresswell says: 'The question of what a person could reasonably be expected to know is a big area of complaints.

'We would shift the onus and ask 'why would the insurer expect a person to know about the other person's health?' We have been calling on insurers to provide more clarity as to what is expected.'

The ABI is working on a benchmark wording for this area, although there is no guarantee that this will improve the situation. It has already produced benchmarks for other areas of travel policies which have not been universally incorporated.

What about other insurers?

• NORWICH UNION requires policyholders to reveal any 'serious or chronic illness or condition of anyone your journey depends on' and keep it informed about everyone's state of health with an annual policy.

• DIRECT LINE expects policyholders to know about any pre-existing conditions of close family members and that these would be excluded.

• INSURE AND GO also takes a hard line.

• AXA is changing the wording on all its policies before the regulation of general insurance in 2005. AXA product manager Steve Wilcox says: 'We no longer specifically ask about the health of people on whom the trip depends, but who are not travelling. We expect people to act as if they are uninsured - that is, not to travel if they know they are likely to have to cancel the trip. We also require medical evidence to back up a claim.'

• AMERICAN EXPRESS also takes a softer line. Joanne Field, marketing manager, travel insurance SAYS: 'We expect customers to disclose to the best of their knowledge the state of health of family members.'