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It also covers baggage delays and late flights, and pays for hijack distress, besides a host of medical expenses when you're abroad.
This has reference to your response to a query on travel insurance. Apart from medical insurance, is there anything that will cover loss or damage to luggage and travel documents such as passport and traveller's cheques? And is there a product that compensates the traveller if he misses his flight? I understand such policies exist in the West. Do Indian insurers also offer them?
While travel insurance in India does not cover missing a flight or loss of travellers cheques, it does cover flight delay and a host of other situations. Though damage to baggage is not covered, entire loss of checked in baggage is covered.
Travel insurance policy offers a comprehensive cover that caters to diverse needs of customers and protects a traveller from a wide range of perils, including:
- Overseas health cover
- Emergency dental treatment
- Hospital daily allowance (after 72 hours)
- Accidental death and dismemberment
- Loss of checked baggage
- Baggage delay (after 12 hours)
- Loss of passport, visa
- Hijack distress allowance
- Trip delay (after 12 hours)
- Home insurance (per family)
- Personal liability
- Repatriation of remains
The maximum cover for travel insurance is $500,000, but the premium will depend on the age of the traveller, the number of days travelled and country/ countries visited.
I am suffering from high blood pressure and plan to get admitted in an Ayurvedic hospital. The prescribed therapies might require me to stay for 10 days. Is it possible for me to file a claim with my insurer? My condition is not pre-existing.
Alternative forms of treatment such as Ayurveda, Homeopathy and Naturopathy are excluded from cover.
If a customer is suffering from high blood pressure before the commencement of the policy, then it will be treated as a pre-existing disease and all claims arising out of pre-existing diseases would not be payable until a certain period of continuous coverage with the insurance company, even under allopathic treatments.
I want to file a claim under my health plan, but my insurance agent does not seem to want to help and has been avoiding my phone calls. Isn't he legally bound to do the necessary paperwork and follow-up to ensure the insurer pays me?
The insurance contract is between the insurance company and the customer, and the agent is not legally bound to take steps to ensure the claim is settled. Having said that, when a customer has to file a claim, though the role of the agent is only that of a facilitator, he will invariably help his customer in all possible ways. It is very rare that an agent would refuse to do so. - Ajay Bimbhet - Managing Director,Royal Sundaram Alliance Insurance Co Ltd.