The Importance Of Looking Around For The Best Skiing Insurance

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 regulates the insurance industry and tries to ensure that you’ll get decent value for money and a good service from your insurer. It is important to remember however that the sale of insurance through travel agents in unregulated, and you’ll have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service should the worst happen. If you need to make a claim this insecurity could become a problem.

The Association of British Travel Agents requires travel agents to take an exam if they wish to sell insurance policies. However these policies are still often too limited in scope and fail to give you proper value for money.

Travel insurance ranks third in the sector that most people complain about, and a significant amount of complaints cannot be dealt with because they are about insurance sales made through unregulated intermediaries such as travel firms. Therefore the important point to come out of this ultimately is that it is always important to look around for the best deal, and to always look into what options are available beyond your travel agent.