Travel insurer agrees reader’s friends were due a full refund

My elderly neighbours are having terrible difficulties claiming money back from Insure and Go after they had to cancel a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the US to visit family. They have had some money back, but it seems the airline they were due to use is withholding a large chunk of the £2,487 they paid. They have been caused much distress and ill health due to the worry. EW, Braintree, Essex

This case has taken some considerable time to unpick, but here goes. Your neighbours paid £2,487 for four return flights to San Francisco through travel agents Chelmsford Star Coop and then, sensibly, took out their own travel insurance with Insure and Go, paying £180 for a single trip policy.

Due to ill health, the trip had to be cancelled and a claim was submitted to Insure and Go. After deducting the airline administration fee and being reimbursed the numerous US taxes and UK air passenger duty, there was still a shortfall of around £800 which couldn’t be explained, and which your neighbours wrongly blamed on the airline. After investigation, I discovered that the flight broker used by Chelmsford Star had wrongly included the £197 fuel surcharge per ticket in the category of “tax” on the invoice, for which the insurer would not ordinarily be liable. After I pointed this out, Insure and Go agreed that the problem stemmed from the documentation it was sent and a further no-quibble refund of £788 is now on the way.

Your neighbours were overjoyed and I know that this money, which they thought was lost, will make a big difference to their lives. If ever there was a case of job satisfaction as the Capital Letters columnist, this was it.

Answering your letters this week is Steve Playle, Trading Standards officer and Team Leader at Surrey Trading Standards Service.

We welcome letters but regret we cannot answer individually. Email: capital.letters@guardian.co.uk. Please include a daytime phone number.

I live in Hampstead, the banker’s dormitory (Bankers told: join the real world on pay, 4 December). Here, all is well with the world, as they breathlessly anticipate their bonuses. The restaurants, bars and designer shops hum with international accents. The Filipino nannies walk the dogs, while the yummy mummies clog the streets with their 4×4s taking designer-togged toddlers to private prep schools. Little sign here of the devastation some of them have helped bring about in the lives of others; no sign at all of any remorse at having done so. How wonderful it would be to call their bluff and wave them off to France or Germany. It’s time to lance the boil. Any political party which doesn’t promise to wield the knife has no right to seek to represent the mass of the people of this country.

Alan Clark

London

• “Executives say losses in other parts of the bank … are separate to profits made by the investment bank.” Doesn’t this explode the myth that banks can’t be split up into “boring” retail banks and “casino” investment banks?

Alan Ball

Danbury, Essex

• A few weeks ago, a representative of the Association of British Insurers protested in a letter (28 August) about his industry being branded “socially useless”, as though it were a bank. You report now, though (Viewpoint, 4 December), that the ABI has come out in support of the RBS bonus plans. So perhaps there isn’t quite as much distance between the “socially useless” banks and the insurance industry.

Phil Back

Wetherby, West Yorkshire

• Very few people know what bankers do. Perhaps their publicity machine could put together “A Day in the Life…”. Then we, as part owners, might warm to them as they let us into what their long working days entail. Thank heavens teachers, nurses, police and other professions don’t hold the country to ransom for six-figure sums when they go about their normal duties of saving lives, educating the next generation, maintaining law and order etc.

Ken Wilbraham

Guildford, Surrey

• So there are no brilliant financiers who are happy to stay where they are, rather than go after even more obscene sums that they don’t really need. How sad is that?

Geoffrey Brace

Exeter

• I just hope none of these bankers who feel they are entitled to a huge bonus this Christmas will be calling for public spending cuts or pay freezes.

Janet Mansfield

Wigton, Cumbria