NEWS ANALYSIS:
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FEATURE:
Canadian travellers puzzled over pot
Building on associations
Full legalisation leads to full confusion
How can collaboration help improve the perception of travel insurance?
ESSENTIAL READING FOR TRAVEL & HEALTH INSURANCE PROFESSIONALS
Tifgroup under fire
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SERVICE DIRECTORY
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DECEMBER 2018 • ISSUE 215
Policies require university-level reading skills
The Times newspaper in the UK has reported that travel insurer Travel Insurance Facilities Group (tifgroup) is under investigation over a series of allegations, including that policyholders have had problems accessing proper medical care
According to an investigation by UK-based consumer advocacy group Which?, many insurance policy documents require universitylevel reading skills and would pose a challenge to even some industry experts
According to an investigation by the newspaper, the Financial Conduct Authority has received a 40,000-word dossier from a whisteblower – including testimony from a former tifgroup claims handler – that accuses the multimillion-pound company of a pattern of practice to delay, avoid or minimise payouts. These supposedly include going against the advice of treating doctors to fly patients home, denying suitable aftercare to patients following an incident, purposefully avoiding contact with treating doctors, and making patients pay upfront for their treatment. According to The Times, the medical council is investigating at least five cases, including one in which a customer who suffered a riding accident while in Spain, resulting in a broken neck, claimed that she was denied a medical flight back to the UK. In another case, it is alleged that tifgroup refused to evacuate a policyholder who suffered a blood clot in his brain while on holiday in Ethiopia; the man subsequently died of sepsis. The whistleblower whose testimony is supposedly included in the dossier is quoted as saying: “I remember patients needing life-saving or lifechanging operations and [the doctor] just wouldn’t
As part of the investigation, Which? ran 40 policy documents from 10 major travel, home, car and pet insurers through readability software to ascertain what level of comprehension skill a reader would need to possess in order to fully understand everything written. According to the results, the average document required a higher level of reading ability than a reader would need to understand Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, and Which? said that this would pose a problem for 43 per cent of working adults with a GCSE reading ability of grade C or below. Separately, the consumer group also showed policy documents to a retired insurance professional, some software engineers and some civil servants and asked them questions, finding that they were unable to answer all the questions correctly. On average, five out of 16 questions related to travel insurance documents were incorrect, while three out of 12 questions related to home insurance were found to be
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US travellers are underinsured A survey has found that, despite numerous record-breaking hurricanes striking all over the world in the past year, many US travellers are not purchasing travel insurance for their trips The survey, which was undertaken by TravelInsurance.com, found that a concerning 54 per cent of US consumers have never purchased travel insurance, with 65 per cent of this group never even having considered it. Forty-seven
per cent of respondents, meanwhile, expressed a lack of knowledge about whether their health insurance would cover them while travelling abroad. The lack of coverage and awareness is even more worrying when set against the findings that 76 per cent of respondents have experienced a flight delay in the past, while 48 per cent have either lost or had luggage stolen, and 35 per cent have either fallen ill while travelling or been travelling with someone who fell ill. “It is really incredible to me that we are where
we are, at least in the US market,” said Stan Sandberg, co-Founder of TravelInsurance.com. “Everywhere else in the world, people buy their travel first, and then buy their travel insurance immediately after.” He suggested that this issue could be driven by the fact that many see travel insurance as more of an optional addon purchase rather than a valuable product in and of itself – many airlines and online travel
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