I purchased a travel insurance policy from AIG Travel Guard for my family's trip in August from Detroit to Cancun. The trip cost was about $4,000, and knowing that there are hurricanes in that area at that time of the year, I decided to buy a travel insurance covering hurricanes. A quick search on the Internet gave me the name of 'AIG Travel Guard'; they were number one in the 'Sponsored Links' on Google when searching for 'hurricane insurance'. I also found some interviews of their officials and ads of their associated agencies. I checked their policies on trip cancellations, and they stated that these are 100% refunded if a trip is cancelled "due to inclement weather conditions". So I bought the trip insuarance...
A day before the travel, we learned that the Hurricane Dean (a category 5 hurricane, one of the most powerful in the Carribean history) was coming exactly to the area we were going to stay. The US Embassy in Mexico advised all US citizens in the area to depart it ASAP; most of the airlines offered full refund or resceduling. (Next day 60,000 tourists were evacuated from Cancun.) Therefore, I had to cancel our trip, and rescheduled it to the same place for October. My trip operator refunded me the whole trip cost, excluding an $800 non-refundable fee charged by the hotel.
After I submitted that $800 claim to AIG TravelGuard, I was quite sure that one of the strongest hurricanes would be accepted by them as 'inclement weather conditions'. Not at all! After "researching" the claim for more than 4 months, (and it took a few reminders from me) they decided that I could still fly to Cancun airport on the departure day, and therefore they don't consider it to be "inclement weather conditions".
I think this is a complete rip-off, and while I am taking it to a small claim court, I just want to warn everyone that any money paid for such travel insurance is a complete waste! If a hurricane comes, it's a lot easier to get the money from the airlines, hotels and tour operators (which didn't take any effort) than from this scam of a business.
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