assist card for travel insurance

[cruiseco]

Originally Posted by sharbin1

Maybe I will. There are so many good travel insurance companies to choose from that it's a shame when a fellow cruiser unknowingly chooses this one.

It sounds like you got your money back for the cruise. Were there other trip arrangements you insured like air flights? If not, was your only loss the cancellation fee charged by the agency?

The reason I ask is that you would not have prepaid that cancellation fee. It would only be charged if you have to cancel. This is important because the plan has the following:

"The Company will pay for the following:
a) unused, non-refundable land or sea expenses prepaid to the Participating Organization."

If that's the case then the denial of the claim, while handled extremely poorly, may have been correct.

[sharbin1]

We did prepay a fee to the travel agency, it was charged when we booked our cruise along with the cruise deposit and that is what we didn't get back.

[klfrodo]

Originally Posted by sharbin1

We did prepay a fee to the travel agency, it was charged when we booked our cruise along with the cruise deposit and that is what we didn't get back.

Did you prepay the insurance premium and that's what you didn't get back? Insurance premiums are not refundable.

[cruiseco]

Originally Posted by sharbin1

We did prepay a fee to the travel agency, it was charged when we booked our cruise along with the cruise deposit and that is what we didn't get back.

If the agency charged you some kind of booking fee, the fee may not fall under the definition of something the insurer will pay for:

"The Company will pay for the following:
a) unused, non-refundable land or sea expenses prepaid to the Participating Organization."

Unfortunately, when looking up the plan's definition of "Land or Sea Arrangements" you get only the following which does absolutely nothing to clear up what can or cannot be insured:

""Land/Sea Arrangements” means land and or sea arrangements made by the Participating Organization."

If they're denying the claim because a "booking fee" doesn't meet this definition of a "land or sea expense" then they might be making the proper claim decision. I'm not saying it's the decision I would have made but given the general vagueness of the definition it might be understandable. I just don't know -- some lawyer once told me that vagueness is generally decided in the favor of whomever didn't write the contract but I don't know how that would help you much.

You can of course get a better decision on this by appealing the matter to your state's department of insurance. But I think a good first course of action might be to contact the travel agency first and try to get them to refund the booking fee to you directly as a customer goodwill gesture. It just seems petty for them to keep the fee plus the commission they made on the sale of the insurance in light of the fact that the cancellation was for a legitimate medical reason.