I couldn’t imagine booking a trip and then canceling it, losing money in the process unless it was an extreme circumstance.
Now imagine someone shelling out over $80,000 for their honeymoon to Africa… Then, due to Ebola fears they decide to cancel even though they’d be visiting countries “more than 3,000 miles from the outbreak in the western part of the continent“.
Does this make any sense? To top it off, the man who booked the trip is now suing the travel agency that booked the trip for him!
Back in October I wrote about how I’d Fly to South Africa Amid Ebola Fears. The thing is that if you just look at a map or read about what was going on when the Ebola outbreak was at a high, you’d see that South Africa and Mozambique were very far away. (Those were the intended destinations of the couple.)
Being in New York, I was closer to Ebola! Oh, and so was the couple since they reside in New York City.
Besides getting a credit from British Airways, the man lost the rest of the money that he had paid.
The man, Matthew Goldstein now feels that the travel agency owes him a refund for not selling him travel insurance!
(FYI- The cost of the travel insurance is $4,000.)
According to the New York Post, “The agent had never offered the insurance, explaining afterward that because the couple would be honeymooning, it would be “bad karma,” the Manhattan Supreme Court suit says“.
The travel agent told the NY Post, “he may have told Goldstein, “If it’s a honeymoon, maybe it’s bad karma” to buy an insurance policy, but he said he doesn’t recall the exact conversation“.
I’d love to find out how this plays out in court.
Find out more about the story here.
Buying regular travel insurance for a trip to Africa might well be sensible. This would cover one for things like cancellation for personal medical reasons (breaking a leg before travel), losing money/bags during the trip, medical expenses on the trip (US health insurance may not cover everything), emergency repatriation, etc. This covers for unexpected costs incurred before/during travel – every traveler has to consider the benefits of this compared with the costs: can they afford the risks of not being insured?
But ‘Cancel for any Reason’ (CFAR) travel insurance can be very expensive – perhaps double the price of the insurance for travel risks. And it will probably pay out only 50% or 75% of the trip cost. This is the sort of insurance that the travel agent might consider to create ‘bad karma’ since it would allow them to cancel for any reason – unreasonable fears of Ebola or just not wanting to travel.
So I don’t think this is about travel insurance – it is about CFAR travel insurance. That would be an important distinction.
If I knew I wasn’t getting most of my money back, I would have not cancelled- and gone anyways. What a fool this guy is.