Why travel insurance is not worth the paper that it’s written on - David Behrens

The purpose of the policies we took out was to insulate us from the worry and expense you expect in times of crisis. Instead they have placed us in what I might charitably call a hostage situation. Indeed, communication with Axa Insurance’s ‘helpline’ was so difficult that I had to pay my own four-figure bill before the hospital would remove the intravenous needles from my wrists and let me out.

But at least I was able to get home, and that’s more than Behrens Junior has been able to do.

He is on what was supposed to be a two-week adventure with his girlfriend in India, a country which, last time I checked, was not one of the ones Trump is trying to wipe off the map. But the affordable flights there all involve stopovers in the Middle East, where travel and most other manifestations of life are on hold.

The airlines have sensed the panic among people who need to be somewhere else and reacted by literally holding them to ransom. They won’t tell you the price of a ticket; they just want to know how much you’re prepared to pay to get home.

In my son’s case, Etihad Airways cancelled his return flight from Kolkata to Manchester via Abu Dhabi at 48 hours’ notice, lamely offering a ‘partial refund’ that doesn’t begin to cover the cost of alternative flights whose fares have risen fivefold.

It’s this business of getting home that illustrates just how few rights passengers really have. If your outbound flight is cancelled the airline is obliged to find you an alternative as soon as possible – but on the way back into Europe, non-European carriers don’t have to lift a finger.

Insurance doesn’t improve your position. On a standard policy the get-out clause of Force Majeure makes cancellations caused by acts of war someone else’s problem. Your problem. My problem.

The reports I had from Kolkata Airport as desperate people begged for crumbs of comfort – a ticket to anywhere would do – brought out the best and worst of humanity. One man claimed he had to get on the plane because he’d left his selfie stick and his watch on it.

But most of those in the queue, my son included, were simply the civilian casualties of political hubris. Not stretcher cases, thank goodness, but economic victims who now face bottomless bills, taking unpaid time off work, perhaps even losing their jobs; who long only to be reunited with their families and to find safe harbour. The insurance system and the regulators have failed them all.

Even those with tickets are not guaranteed a flight. Etihad – an airline so rich it can fritter away £80m a year on bankrolling Manchester City – charged our son four times the original price to rebook him on a new service it then cancelled.

I don’t know when we will see him again and suddenly I sense the agony of separation families must have endured in the 1940s as they waved their children off to war. For though India is not a combat area, Abu Dhabi is smack in the missile zone.

Of course in the theatre of war, travel arrangements are just a sideshow. Yet the airport chaos in the Middle East and beyond exposes the iniquitous distribution of money among the players: unlimited extravagancies for business interests and weapons of death, not a penny for the dispossessed.

That last category includes us all, one way or another. We will pay for this aberration at the petrol pumps and in supermarkets for food which is suddenly more expensive to produce because all the fertiliser that’s made in the Gulf region cannot reach us via the Strait of Hormuz.

And why would that be? Blame those insurance companies again: they won’t take the financial risk of letting cargo ships dodge the missiles unleashed by an incoherent, incompetent president who thinks he can start and end wars arbitrarily with no heed to the consequences.

So if you have loved ones trying to find their way home this weekend from Asia, Australia and the many other parts of the world that are effectively in lockdown right now, I wish them Godspeed. And if you are spared the emotional torment, prepare yourself for the economic anguish to come. There is no insurance against that.