Before we can go ahead and book there is the small point of having travel insurance in place. Now this is not normally a major stumbling block but I very soon came to the conclusion that all the cards are stacked against us. If you are …
· under 60 years of age
· have no medical problems
· travelling on a trip of 30 days or less
· not booking more than 12 months in advance
· not spending more than £5k on the trip
… then you can take your pick of travel insurance policies – even having one or two of these factors to take into consideration there is plenty of choice, however factoring all of these into the equation and you have problems.
I then spent at least two days trawling the Internet looking at every travel insurance site that I could find only to be met with the same answer “sorry we are not able to quote for this trip”. I even resorted to contacting some local insurance brokers who came back with the same story. By this stage we were getting desperate and were considering changing the itinerary or even cancelling the whole idea. Then all of a sudden something caught my eye on one of the sites I was visiting – the words “bespoke travel insurance” – this was definitely my “Eureka” moment.
Once I started to contact the “bespoke” travel insurance brokers things started to move although not in the way that I would have liked. The first quote that I got was for £1,600 and was for an annual policy which would have needed to be renewed next year. Then I got one for £1,300 for trip – this was sounding better and finally a third one for £1,500, so at least we had had some quotes and they were all talking roughly the same sort of numbers.
I then had a phone call out of the blue from one of the companies that I had been enquiring with online who offered to quote for the trip. No harm in getting another one I thought, so talked with the girl about what our requirements were. A couple of days later she came back to me with a quote of £230, to which my response was “How much?” – more in shock at the low price than anything else, coupled with the fact that the policy was with the insurance company that one of the other quotes was with. Now this is where the fiasco begins and where I wish I had kept my mouth shut. Because the quote was so low she offered to check it – anyway to cut a long story short after three days of backwards and forwarding they realised that they were reading the quote wrong from the underwriters (told you so came to mind). Anyway due to them missing the insurance tax off the quote I did manage to get the insurance for about £1,200 – had I kept my mouth shut I could have saved myself £1k on this as, in the event of a claim, there would have been nothing that they could have done about it.