Katie C

Jul 10, 2015

Unfortunate experience with poor customer service

A family trip to NZ took a turn for the worse with Dunedin Airport closing due to snow and ice. Our flight home was cancelled and the airline booked us on the next available flight which was Dunedin-Christchurch the following day with a connection home from Christchurch to Australia the next morning. This was not how we hoped to get home with a 6-month-old and my mother in two. It was far from convenient. I rang TID and the person I spoke to was far from empathetic. A quick google of the weather in Dunedin would have shown her our predicament was in fact true. She advise that we needed to stay in a similar standard of accommodation. I then asked how much TID would cover. Her answer was not what I wanted to hear - $200 per each 12 hours of delay. That wouldn't be enough. I asked if that was per person or for our group. She seemed put out to have to find that out. Finally she came back with 'per group'. I then explained that with four people (three people and a baby) it was near impossible to find something under $200 unless it was a backpackers. So I was told to look on AirBNB!!! Stay at a strangers house with a little baby. Good one. That was one of the most ridiculous and irresponsible things I have ever heard from an insurance company. While I am sure that most people on AirBNB are decent, I didn't want to stay with a stranger with a young child. I explained that my mother had a separate policy with TID to which she said that we then probably had two separate amounts to work with. So I booked the same apartment we'd been staying in (the same room number so it was most definitely of a 'similar standard' as first instructed). The conversation didn't really get much better as this individual just didn't really care that we were stranded at the airport in the snow without transport or any sensible way of getting home. I don't know whether she expected us to get a bus back into town but I didn't even bother asking any further questions at that point as I was still desperately trying to re-book our flights all the way home the following day (so we didn't end up with the same problem the next day). So I hired another car (which is how we had been travelling the entire holiday) and figured I would deal with it later. Thankfully we were able to get all the way home the day after the cancelled flight. I have yet to fill in my claims form as I have to now wait until the accommodation 'splits the bill' so that we can lodge separate claims. This seems totally and utterly ridiculous in this day and age. I was #justaTID unhappy with this phone call and I do hope that other people who need to make claims through TID get treated a little bit better. If this person was sitting in front of a computer I am sure it would have taken very little time for her to search and get a bit of an understanding of the situation. Instead we were treated as if we were not telling the truth and as if our dilemma was an inconvenience to her. It was certainly not our intent to be stranded an extra day and the list of subsequent inconveniences caused by our flight delay is much longer than the insurance company needs to know about (i.e. cost involved in extending the car parking at our Australian airport, lengthy transit times, getting home much later in the evening than we had planned, arranging emergency dog sitting/feeding etc).