Travel Guard, answering a travel insurance enquiry for a company their claims line serves, said something worth hearing concerning a topic that no travel insurance policy is satisfactory on: lost or stolen travel documents including passports. To my enquiry as to what happens if you can't get a written police report, they say you can now give them a note explaining the circumstances that you could not get one.
The rule they always have in travel insurance, that you must obtain a written report to base your claim on, conflicts with the whole nature of travel risk. How can they possibly know that the police or other officials will be willing to provide the written report? What if they won't, and in a foreign country, how are you supposed to make them? Even in a European democracy, let alone in totally corrupt countries?
To a common sense enquiry as a buyer, for once I have got a better answer than I expected to get. It is some progress on the issue that concerns me so intensely, of losable travel documents and your safety when having to use them: particularly for spectrumites because of dexterity issues dyspraxia and attention deficit that make small objects easier to lose. Of course, given the complex trickiness of insurance and all the unpredictable details of a loss situation that you can not know what they will be until it happens, the value of this consumer victory remains small compared to the safety need that folks' safety when travelling should not depend on carried physical documents at all, and the safety victory if this 200 year old practice that big business interests have habituated our culture to accept was actually stopped.
Maurice Frank
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