-
If you have to cut short a trip (for example a relative at home is taken ill), Platinum covers you £7,500 for reasonable, necessary costs to return home and resume your trip later.
Can you fly this in business class, or must you choose economy? Does it make a difference what class the original flights were in?
you should discuss this with your insurer, they’d firstly expect you to be trying to change whatever ticket you had already. If that wasn’t possible then I suspect flying back in an equivalent class would be OK. If you had booked economy then they’d likely expect you to fly back economy. though if there was only business class left on the flight going a lot sooner you may get that authorised
What the £7500 limit certainly isn’t is a target for you to spend up to and expect to get reimbursed
When I had to claim under these circumstances, my original booked flight was in business class and we booked a new ticket home in business class, paying ourselves as our original ticket was not changeable and the insurance company Amex uses was closed for claims calls at the time we found out we needed to go home. No issue with the claim at all, but they said there was a requirement to buy an equivalent ticket to what our original travel ticket was, and that we had to cancel our original ticket ASAP and reclaim taxes etc. I think you would struggle to get a payout if there were economy tickets available and you booked business.
You need to proceed carefully as suggested above. It’s likely to be a fairly large claim so the justification for the claim and costs incurred will be closely scrutinised. As above, the insurer will expect you to have tried to change your booking with the airline and provided evidence of refusal and/or seeking a refund to be offset against any claim.
Oh that part is new to me… the insurer would prefer that you modify your existing inbound (and then buy new outbound and inbound for resuming the vacation afterwards) than to just buy a new inbound (and then later a new outbound to resume the trip before returning on the originally booked inbound)?
@flywheel – it isn’t really a question of what an insurer “would prefer” it’s complying with the term that costs incurred in cutting short your trip and/or resuming it must be both necessary and reasonable. You have a duty to mitigate your losses and when you are spending other people’s money, whether it might be your insurer’s or your employer’ etc. you need to be careful. To the extent it is possible to get Amex explicitly to agree the costs you will incur up front that would be good. In respect of business class vs economy, there is nothing explicit vs some sections which specify economy but there is still nothing agreeing to pay like for like classes so you still need to stay within the “necessary and reasonable”.
Also, not all insurers will actually cover you to resume your trip. Cover is normally a ‘curtailment’ section with the expectation that they cover the costs for you to get home ASAP and the costs for the remainder of the trip that you miss out on, and that’s it. There is also a requirement for you to cancel and recover as much money yourself as soon as you are aware there is a problem – we spent the hour before getting on our flight home going through every hotel, car and activity booking and cancelling, even if we got nothing back. You have to do this.
As others have said, it’s likely to be a big claim and no guarantee of payout. When we did it, I had a choice of a £5000pp flight with BA or a £2000pp indirect flight with only 2 hours longer journey time. We went with the £2000 flight just in case there wasn’t a successful claim as I didn’t want to be on the hook for £10k. It works better if you can speak to the insurer before spending, but it was urgent we headed home immediately and the offices were closed for 6 more hours, so we took our chance.
Don’t forget that coverage is also dependent on you proving that you did not know that there was a chance your relative could become ill enough for you to need to come home at the point you booked every element of your trip. I had to provide letters from my dad’s doctors confirming the date symptoms were reported, diagnosis made, etc, before they were willing to settle the claim.
Due to a serious water leak into my property, I had to interrupt my vacation to fly home for a couple of nights to check/mitigate damage, no time to check insurance and it was peak summer holiday season.
I called Amex about 1100 to book me in CE on a flight home that afternoon, and flight back to hols the day after next, plus UK airport transfers. Original holiday flights were CE.
Submitted the claim on my return, they asked for a copy of the original flight booking and the emergency one, it was paid in full, took about 3 weeks from submitting the claim to payment.
I have experience, sort of, with this. TL;DR – no real issues with a like for like, they’ll also accept you upgrading yourself if you can justify it and there’s no extra cost (in my experience – as always, YMMV – but in addition to my reason below, there’s a few reasons you might, such as breaking your leg while on holiday (as long as the accident was an insured event), for example).
Back in Jan I was in Dubai, due to fly DXB-DOH (Y) then DOH-ADL-AKL (reward J), stay in AKL for a few days before returning home (AKL-MEL, paid J). The Auckland floods occurred, which made me going to AKL pointless. As I was in DXB, I cancelled DXB-DOH and DOH-DXB-AKL (small canx fee and points returned). I had to then abandon AKL-MEL (NZ J, approx A$850). I rebooked myself DXB-MEL direct on EK in F (170,000 QF points plus EK’s absurd surcharge, which was around $1,200 I think). There was only one seat and it was F, what a shame.
Anyway, once I was home, I considered my situation and thought I was probably justified claiming, but I wasn’t really sure what for, so I submitted everything to Amex (AXA) for them to consider. I based the claim on the extra cash cost of getting home (didn’t lose any points, all hotels were flex) and/or loss of the paid segment – I did make a point of explaining why I’d “upgraded” myself from J to F (no seats, that was genuine) and made it clear I wasn’t seeking reimbursement/compensation for the QF points I used (I got the points back I’d have used to fly there in J, so that was just a swap and upgrade cost, which I considered a personal choice, albeit unavoidable if I wanted to take that specific flight).
Given it was slightly unusual, it wasn’t closed in the seven seconds Amex/AXA claims usually are, but ultimately they agreed to pay the cost of the cash element of the DXB-MEL (which essentially made me whole). I only had to prove that I’d booked my somewhat ridiculous combination of tickets using Amex cards, which I had, but that was the only evidence they asked for (I think I included a link to NZ Herald or something re the storms/flooding at the time, but that would have been simple enough for them to find out anyway).
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Popular articles this week:
