Read about our award winning Coronavirus (COVID-19) cover included on all policies here
Our policies include our award winning COVID-19 cover, to help you decide if this cover is suitable for your needs please view our dedicated Coronavirus Page which explains how your cover applies in a number of circumstances.
While we recommend you read our Coronavirus Page to understand in more detail the cover we include as standard we need to make you aware of the following:
Prior To Travel: You will be covered for cancellation of your trip if you fall ill with COVID-19 or are required to self isolate by Track and Trace or the NHS COVID-19 App and cannot travel. You will not be covered if you need to cancel due to government restriction on travel or if you will need to quarantine either at your destination or on return home.
During Your Trip: You will be covered if you are denied boarding at your departure point (ie Airport, Cruise or Train terminal) due to detected symptoms of COVID. You are also covered for reasonable additional transport and/or accommodation expenses costs if you need to extend your stay due to compulsory COVID-19 quarantine (for example if you are required to self isolate due to you testing positive or being a close contact of someone who tests positive). If you fall ill with COVID-19 you are covered if you need medical treatment or repatriation to the UK. You will not be covered if you wish to return early to avoid a requirement to quarantine on your return.
Our policies DO NOT require you to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Please note however that our policies do not offer any cover if you fail to hold the relevant documentation as required by your airline (or other public transport such as a cruise ship or train) or destination country. For example if your destination country requires you to provide either proof of being fully vaccinated or a current negative test certificate and you are denied boarding/entry due to not providing valid documents there is no cover under our policies.
Our policies do not cover the costs of COVID testing or vaccination either prior to, during, or post your trip.
Our policies are valid for travel to the countries shown on your certificate of insurance. If you travel to a country where the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) or other regulatory authority advise against travel your cover may be reduced, click here for more information.
Please note that all cover noted above is subject to terms and conditions.
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Customer ServiceWe are sorry to hear that you need to make a claim against your insurance and wanted to make you aware that claims handling is taking longer than normal at the current time.
It is currently taking around 10 weeks on average to process a claim. In general, you won't hear from the claims team until around 8 weeks after your submission when a claims handler picks up your case. We recommend you do not send follow-up e-mails or make chase phone calls to CEGA until 10 weeks have passed unless they have contacted you, as, doing so diverts resource from reviewing claims documents.
As with most travel related businesses CEGA (the claims handler appointed by the insurer of your policy) had to reinstate their team to normal capacity in 2022. Based on travel expectations in late 2021 they aimed to reach 80% of pre-pandemic staffing level which they did by early 2022.
Since then there have been many large scale surge events in claims including significant travel disruption both around Easter and in the ramp up to the summer holidays and significant numbers of COVID related cancellations due to the latest variant. Since it became apparent that claims levels were higher than anticipated CEGA started a large scale drive to increase headcount and reached pre-pandemic numbers in June.
This drive continues and headcount is expected to hit 120% of pre-pandemic numbers by the end of the summer period (we note that significant training is required for a claims handling agent so there is a rolling 2 month process to get new staff ready to handle cases).
As the CEGA team has been back to full capacity since June we are seeing slow but steady progress in processing times, and we expect this to continue to improve as new staff join the team over the coming few months.
If you've made a claim online you should get an initial e-mail with your claim number and asking you to provide documents within 24 hours, but, no more than 36 hours. If you haven't, please contact us so that we can check your claim has been correctly lodged.
If you haven't heard from CEGA after 12 weeks please contact our support team, and we will escalate your case with CEGA to determine the cause of the delay, and find out what has gone wrong.