My bag was stolen the first night in Barcelona. I did everything you are supposed to & got a police report for Nationwide Insurers. Now, weeks later I have discovered that the Insurers are as bad as the thief! In fact probably s/he needed the money more.
I filled in all the forms straight away & sent everything I could to back up the things I was claiming for. These were the typical handbag items for most women on holiday. In fact probably not as much as most because I travel light. Along with most people I don't keep receipts for more than a year as most things aren't guaranteed for longer than that. I also don't keep bank statements for more than a couple of years either.
So after a couple of weeks with no acknowledgement of receiving my claim or action on it I rang & asked what was happening. It was being processed.
Then yesterday I had a phone call. They won't pay for my handbag because I don't have a receipt - it was a gift from my husband who has died. I did send them a manufacturers registration card as proof of purchase. They will pay for a purse, despite the fact I have no receipt, because it is a personal item. So why isn't my bag a personal item? The agent wanted a photograph of the bag & the purse. Who on earth takes photos of these items & how is a photo proof that you actually own it?
At first the agent denied getting the receipt for my new camera so said they wouldn't pay for it. Then he found it, but said he wouldn't pay because the receipt total wasn't the same as my claim. That was because I had deducted the cost of the gizmo that transfers the images direct from the card to the camera, which I hadn't taken away with me.
As for the mobile, which is a very basic Nokia camera phone, not an all singing all dancing touch screen one, I didn't have the receipt. So I sent them the printout of the calls made after the phone was pinched from the T Mobile website where I was registered. (I had phoned the day I posted the claim to say I had found the Nokia handbook which I had forgotten to include & which they said they may accept as proof of purchase). The agent said he did now want me to send that. But I couldn't send it to a named person who was handling my claim. That isn't the way they work. It just goes to the address & you have to hope it will arrive in your claim file & not be lost. Although I could prove how much credit was on the PAYGo at the point it was stolen it isn't their policy to pay that.
By this time I had got over being very angry & was in fact in tears. I felt that I had been robbed twice over. It is obvious from my claim that it isn't inflated. I am not a person who makes serial insurance claims & they can check that on their systems. I feel that the whole insurance ball game has changed hugely in the decades since I last made a travel insurance claim. It seems to me that there is very little point in having baggage travel insurance unless you are obsessive about producing proof of ownership of every single item you take away with you. A claim is not judged on past history & the reasonableness of the claim as I feel it should be. Do they really think I would have wasted part of an evening & a whole morning of my 5 day holiday in a police station if the claim weren't genuine?
I understand that some people do make spurious claims, but the premiums reflect that & we all pay for it. It's bad enough that Nationwide won't pay the replacement value of any of my posessions, which I didn't realise. But their unreasonable demands in terms of the standard of proof, & the lengthy processing of the claim mean that clients are very much out of pocket.
What is the point?
No comments:
Post a Comment