Nick, I am not too sure what you are on about! The point about the joining fee is good – I thought that it came out about that, bit like selling airline tickets, now that airlines want to charge agents for GDS bookings!! Not too sure I fully understand what you mean by the financial failure bit though. BUT No-one seems to able to answer – Why should there have been any need to include the sale of travel insurance under the FSA in the first place? Agents had a good and thorough understanding of the subject – more so than the FSA, it would appear and were well placed to advise on the subject and indeed, to work out if an application or claim needed to be signed in green ink. Interesting point – the largest ever claim for medical on a travel policy was around £250,000 (unless the record has been broken) so if you have 1 mill or 10 mill, its a bit academic. The crucial things for me are – 1. Adequate cancellation cover (cheaper policies may only cover a holiday cost of, say £300 a head, which does not go very far) 2. Adequate medical incl. repatriation (ever bearing in mind it is the insurance company (after taking professional advice), not you, that decides about repatriation) and 3. Airline failure (!) and, of course, a clear telephone number. I don’t worry too much about valuables, if you do own the crown jewels what are you doing with them in Malaga? Leave them locked in the safe….. In many cases really valuable stuff is often covered under home contents. Oh! And be really honest about any pre-exisiting medical conditions….

It may not be in the best interest of agents to advise clients financially but no-one works for nothing and if the client mis-interprets what is said, for want of a better expression, in this American “if something happens to me it must be someone else’s fault” culture the cost could be very high. The whole subject had been best left alone, it wasn’t broken (basically) and did not need fixing…….

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Simple put the cost to an average travel agent to join the FSA directly is just over 100% of what they make gross on selling a travel insurance policies. So yes they will pay for the privilege of selling insurance. A lot of agents have chosen to become an Introducer or an appointed agent for an insurance company. These means they are Hand out leaflets or like Tesco just take money.

The other thing as I already posted is the also effects Financial Failure Insurance as agents can not now sell these, which means more customers money unprotected. When asked for a comment the FSA said they did not realise this (after 5 years of investigations) also another comment was that % wise travel agents get less complaints than FSA members. So they had a very good case to bring us under the rules, we made them look bad.

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Yes, I think its time I introduced some comment guidelines.

@ Murray

Whilst I appreciate the comments, I do not like the tone of this comment and a few others you’ve left in the past. Please remember that we are trying to make life easier for consumers to understand how changes in the industry affects them. So let’s leave out the gripes, and stick to the facts.

Thanks

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squabbling aside, i suspect consumers will unfortunately be none the wiser after reading this post, which is a shame.

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