The Importance of Looking For The Best Travel Insurance For Skiers

If you plan to hit the slopes and go skiing this season, you should first make sure that your travel insurance policy provides you with the level of protection that best suits your needs. All too often, skiers who buy their travel insurance through a travel agent or a tour operator find they don’t have sufficient cover to meet their needs.

Hundreds of thousands of people every year go skiing without adequate cover. This is usually because they buy their insurance through the travel agents which sell them their holiday. These agents are left to go unregulated in the way they sell insurance, so many people quite easily find themselves in a situation where their insurance policy fails to give them the cover they are looking for.

More than a million Britons went skiing last year, and half of these booked their holiday with a travel agent. So this suggests far too many are hitting the slopes without sufficient insurance cover.

This can cause many problems. When you are buying insurance as part of a holiday package with your travel agent, you are typically told simply to tick a box on a form and you do not have it explained to you exactly what you are paying for, or what the detailed terms and conditions are.

To add to the complications, it is common for travel agents to fail to tell customers that pre-existing medical conditions need to be declared. This will usually be specified in the policy’s small print, but most people will not look at this until it is too late.

The Financial Services Authority is the insurance industry’s regulatory body and they try to make sure you are given proper service and the best possible value for money from your insurer. However because the sale of insurance through travel agents goes unregulated you will not get any access to the Financial Ombudsman Service should anything go wrong. If you need to make a claim this may be a problem.

The Association of British Travel Agents has in place a compulsory exam for any agents that want to sell insurance. However the policies they sell are often limited in scope and can offer poor value for money.

A lot of people remain unclear about what their travel insurance gives them, and find that when they need to make a claim their policy is not as good as they thought when they originally bought it. Ultimately what is important is that you always look around the market for the best deal, and never simply accept what your travel agent or tour operator puts in front of you.