My battle against corporate dickheadedness

After his travel plans were cancelled, Rory Gibson launched a battle with his travel insurance company. Now, it’s getting personal, he shares.

Earlier this year I almost lost the will to live trying to get sense (and service) out of Telstra. I couldn’t, so moved on, a broken man.

But feeling refreshed from all this down time, I’ve returned to the fray battling corporate dickheadedness.

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This time it is the travel insurance company Budget Direct which is with which I am in dispute, locked in a situation I reckon many of you with cancelled travel plans might share.

When my surf trip to Indonesia was wiped out in April, I assumed the declaration of a pandemic would derail any claim.

Rory Gibson is a columnist for The Sunday Mail. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

But I checked. Hey ho, no mention of a pandemic in the general exclusions list. No mention of a pandemic at all. I put in a claim for the cost of the airfares.

To my amusement, it was knocked back. Budget Direct said it was because when I took out the policy in February my powers to predict the future should have made me aware that an unknown killer disease surfacing in China in January would derail travel in Indonesia in April.

Their contention was based on the WHO announcing on January 30 that the coronavirus outbreak was a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Then they got personal. A “reasonable person”, they said, should have been able to predict what was coming. So I’m unreasonable?

I pointed out that in the past decade the WHO had announced four other PHEICs, none of which led to curtailment of international travel, and indeed the WHO explicitly discourages travel restrictions in such an event. So where’s the precedent?

I also reminded Budget Direct that the WHO scolded Australia for banning travellers from China.

And by their logic, if I should have known in February that a virus that spreads faster than head lice in a primary school was going to cause global mayhem, Budget Direct should have known too. Yet they still happily sold me a policy. I suggested that was a tad unscrupulous.

In lieu of a long-haul flight, I’m strapped in for a long-haul fight.