A weather warning for all travellers out there – your travel insurance may not cover you if you haven't checked the forecast.
Cromwell resident Leigh Buttars had a travel claim turned down because of a "foreseeable weather event" - despite the weather event that caused her problems never being forecast.
"It just baffles me," she said. Leigh and her family spent a year saving for a cruise from Brisbane, Australia around the Pacific.
"This is the biggest thing we've done. So it was pretty important," she said.
Leigh and husband Steve paid for the trip in stages – one of the last things they purchased was travel insurance.
On the day Leigh paid for the policy, she later discovered that an online news website had published an article warning of an impending storm for the Dunedin region in Otago.
Three days later, the Buttars drove to Queenstown Airport for their flight to Brisbane – but it was cancelled due to high winds.
"We all went through duty free and stood in the big glass windows watching planes try to land and not being able to. So they ended up cancelling all of the flights".
Missing the flight meant the Buttars missed the boat, and the family decided to use the flight credit to take a trip to Rarotonga instead.
But they lost all the money they'd paid for the cruise and on-shore activities. When they returned from Rarotonga, Leigh put in an insurance claim for the lost cruise costs losses, about $4300.
She thought she'd be covered by her insurance – but that's not the way the family’s insurance company saw it.
CoverMore has declined the Buttars claim on the basis there was a "mass media warning" of bad weather for the wider region.
CoverMore’s chief executive Bruce Morrison told Fair Go in a statement that "the reason we provided the media links was simply to demonstrate that the storm was receiving widespread media attention across a variety of media and, as a result, flight cancellations had become a foreseeable event".
The articles the company provided the family all related to the weather bomb that caused widespread flooding, slips and heavy rainfall across Canterbury and eastern Otago – but there's no mention of high winds forecast for Queenstown.
"It was an actual link to [the NZ Herald] website which I’ve never been on before … I watched the weather forecast and saw that it was heavy rain and snow. Which wasn't even the reason that our flight was cancelled, it wasn’t raining. It was wind," said Leigh.
MetService told Fair Go there was no warning at all of high wind gusts for inland Otago, and at the time Leigh booked her insurance there were no official weather warnings out for the region either.
CoverMore refused to re-examine its decision after being approached by Fair Go, and has advised the couple to lay a claim with the Ombudsman if they want the claim reviewed.
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