Friday 26 December 2014

What Your Insurers Won't Tell You

This is my second last post about my 2014 Australia Trip. I always wanted to write about this but I have to wait until everything settled, and wait until I'm free :)

So, here I am, telling you what happened to our insurance claim for the miss-connection.

4 of us booked our Air Asia tickets from Penang to Sydney (transit through KL) and from Adelaide to Penang (transit through KL) in 2 different booking. I book first, the rest of the 3 booked later. We bought travel insurance from AIG as usual.

When announced that KLIA2 will start to operate on 9th May 2014, I had a very bad feeling. Our flights were dated 9th May 2014 too.

On 9th May 2014, KLIA2 got "kelam kabut" on their first day of operation. Our flight from Penang to KL was delayed for more than 4 hours and hence we missed our flight from KL to Sydney. Though Air Asia arranged us to take the next earliest flight from KL to Sydney, our schedule was all messed up. We missed our express bus from Sydney to Melbourne, we have to pay one extra night of accommodation at Sydney, and we wasted our 1 night accommodation at Melbourne.

After I came back from Australia, the moment I receive the letter from Air Asia, I immediately submitted my insurance claim. The 3 girls submitted theirs one week after.

My insurance claim process was quite smooth (still took more than 3 weeks though), and I received my RM600 cheque in about one month time. The other 3 girls received their cheques more than 2 months later, but the amount was RM200 each!

We were shocked! We sent emails to request for explanations but there were no responses from the insurance company (except some stupid computer-generated-auto-reply). After many rounds of complaints and follow up from the victims and from myself, 5 months after the incident, finally they received their rightful claim amount of total RM600 each. However, until today, no one cares to tell us what went wrong at the first place.

If we had no patience to deal with all those rude officers, if we gave up, I'm sure the insurance company would happily close the file and forget about this episode.

Don't naively believe the slogan of "Treat Customers Fairly", don't naively think international companies will provide international standard service.

Know your rights! 

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