We have highlighted the value of travel insurance on many, many occasions on this page and we do so once again now a result of what can only be described as a very unfortunate situation a reader called Ruairí has found himself in.
He and his wife were due to take a mini-break to Dubrovnik in early June and booked the four-day jaunt with Love Holidays.
“We were, needless to say, beyond excited about our trip away together for it would have been our first holiday away without our four kids in 20 years.”
A few days before they were due to leave Ruairí’s knee started swelling and he “started to show signs of fever by that afternoon so booked myself in to a Doctor on Call who subsequently sent me to A&E.”
It turned out that he had something known as bursitis – a painful build up of fluid on the knee, Dr Google tells us.
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It was not a mild case however and he had “a very serious infection running through my body that the medics fought hard to keep under control over the coming week”.
While he was in hospital his wife contacted Love Holidays to see if they could move their holiday to a different time or be reimbursed “but they said that we were within the five-day grace period so therefore we weren’t entitled to it. They did offer what they called a refund, with applicable fees, which left us with merely €130 out of the €1200 payment,” he says.
“Sadly we didn’t have travel insurance, and we are devastated to have lost out on both the holiday and the money. But now as I’m coming in to better overall health it’s hitting hard the loss we have endured and the lack of humanity in the whole process that was completely out of our hands,” he says.
He says, “Love Holidays were not in any way empathetic to our situation and my wife tried all she possibly could while her husband was in a pretty serious state of health throughout last week. I know this is probably a clean-cut case of ‘read the small print’ and I’m really clutching at straws here, but we are a struggling family with limited funds and had to work a lot of extra hours to make the short trip away possible so €1200 to us is a substantial amount of money and I’m sure it’s a drop in the ocean for Love Holidays, who realistically could have allowed us move the holiday to a different time whilst still using their service and could also have had the time to fill the apartment we were supposed to avail of.”
Now we do have huge sympathy for Ruairí and his wife and would be heartbroken if we found ourselves in such a situation. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for airlines and travel companies to behave in the way Love Holidays have in this instance and the point they will all make is that while this is an exceptional and unfortunate circumstance for our reader, people with travel plans do fall ill with serious and sometimes not so serious conditions all the time. In short, it is a common enough thing which is why travel companies tend to adopt a fairly strict approach to refunds except in the case of death and very, very serious health issues when the often show more sympathy.
In any event, we did put our reader’s case to Love Holidays to see if anything could be done to help him out.
We contacted Love Holidays and while it was sympathetic to our reader’s situation, a spokeswoman said there was little it could do for him.
As we said she points out that it is “important that customers purchase travel insurance as soon as they book their holiday to ensure they are covered for unforeseen circumstances that may affect their ability to travel.”
She said that if its customers do not have travel insurance and can not travel it will “refund all elements of their holiday that offer free cancellation and waive our standard cancellation fees. We will also try to secure a refund for any non-refundable elements (usually flights) from our suppliers, however this is always at the suppliers’ discretion.”
However, she said that in this instance the timeframe was very short and it was contacted three days prior to travel, “at which point the entire holiday was non-refundable. We do not offer free cancellation or amendments within five days of travel due to the refund and amendment terms of our suppliers.”
She said a small portion of the trip could be refunded and the Love Holidays customer service team “is reaching out to them to ensure it is processed”.
