Are You Traveling This Summer?

A Note of Caution Regarding Travel Insurance and Parkinson’s

Lessons we learned from our nine months struggle with AIG Travel Guard Insurance may help you avoid falling victim to the same problems we encountered after filing a claim for a trip we canceled due to a serious health incident of my husband. 

After filling out tedious insurance forms and forwarding medical records to AIG they all too quickly denied our claim maintaining that Parkinson’s disease was a preexisting condition and therefore trip expenses were ineligible for reimbursement. 

Lesson 1:  Be sure your policy includes a pre-existing condition waiver in the insurance package you purchase. When purchasing the insurance, also get a fitness to travel statement from the Parkinson’s person’s primary care physician. Both these precautions will be invaluable if you need to file a claim.

Our story however continued. In despair I called our Travel Agent for advice. 

She assured me that our plan did include the waiver. She instructed me to underline the waiver clause and send it back to our claims officer.  

She assumed that would resolve the problem but AIG continued to procrastinate for another five months. Following each inquiry, we received a brief reply insinuating that our case was being reviewed. However, when I looked up our case number via the AIG website it reported the case was CLOSED, claim denied. 

Lesson 2:  If you ever have a lingering case like ours, be sure to check all sources available to verify responses you receive. Indefinite procrastination is likely a tool of the claims department.

Ultimately, we asked our lawyer to check the travel policy to see if we had a case.  He made one phone call to the claims department as our legal representative and within a week AIG had turned the case over to a new claims adjuster who admitted that “mistakes were made.” They awarded us all airfare expenses and sent the check the same week. 

Lesson 3:  Sadly, you may need a lawyer to advocate the claim for you. 

And now, one final caveat. Our non-refundable lodging expenses were denied reimbursement because they were not added to the Coverage and Benefit List with a dollar amount limit.  Let our loss be your gain by making sure your list of coverage and benefits is specific and complete and most importantly includes a preexisting condition waiver.