Boots Travel Insurance

We took out a gold policy with Boots travel insurance for a holiday to the Dominican republic. During our stay our 2 year old contracted croup and after visting the TUI hotel doctor it was recommended we urgently went to hospital.

When I phoned boots travel insurance the call centre worker immediately told me to refuse treatment with the hospital and said we would need to book a cab and drive to a hospital in the capital of Haiti across the border (a 5 hour trip). Given his condition we refused and went with the hotel doctors recommendation to go with the hospital 20 minutes away.

After numerous attempts to pre approve the treatment we eventually gave up incurring a £4,500 bill on our credit card.

Speaking to TUI reps they were astonished they would decline the hospital and had never heard of an insurance company doing this before.

6 Months of arguing and an appeal to the insurance ombudsman Boots insurance finally relented and payed us back (sans interest on credit card)

Absolutely disgusted by them and would never ever recommend them to anyone

My son purchased Boots Silver Travel Insurance for a 4 month backpacking experience through Asia. In November 2017, whilst riding a moped in Vietnam, he was involved in an accident and sustained multiple fractures to his leg and dislocated his thumb. Boots initially refused to confirm he had a policy with them and this continued for 14 hours. Eventually they acknowledged he did, but refused to pay as my son had not sat a CBT Test, yet nowhere on their policy did they specifically make reference to this test, just "required to have appropriate licence". My son thought he had, as his driving licence had a "to and from" expiry date against a picture of moped on the back of his licence and this was deemed appropriate by both Vietnamese Police and the company hiring the moped. Boots did not offer any help to my son throughout this experience and we had to deal with all the Vietnamese authorities, including police, hospitals, embassies and immigration ourselves, resulting in bills totalling £12,000! No hospital would help my son without insurance however he eventually persuaded one to take him, resulting in his operation around 36 hours after the accident! Boots should categorically highlight that the CBT Test MUST BE TAKEN, otherwise riding a moped would result in non-payment. Disgraceful service from what we thought were a reputable, trustworthy company. I do not want any other family to go through what we have been through by purchasing a Boots Travel Insurance Policy.

Boots travel is awful and should be avoided.

I won't go into too much detail on my shocking experience with boots and will just give one example...

They kept me waiting for a very straight forward query for over 3 weeks. I had to chase then numerous times after they never got back to me within their agreed timescales.

Boots is just a middle man and passes the buck to the incompetent third parties they use.

I would hate to even think how they would handle and respond to anything that came close to a medical emergency or claim.

After over 3 weeks they finally confirmed my policy wasn't going to be suitable for the length of my trip. So they cancelled it and left me to find another.

I would never trust anything as important as travel insurance with this company.

I went online to get a quote from Boots. After the laborious questions (same as all Companies of course) a notice appeared asking me to ring an 0845 number to continue. The phone rang for ages - my call was very important of course- and when it was answered the first thing I heard was a girl laughing..... Anyway I was then told that they couldn't insure me with no explanation. So why wasn't I told this online to save me wasting my time and why isn't it an 0800 number.

We went to Lanzarote in May 2017. My wife had a urinary tract infection on the way to the airport to come home. It was particularly aggressive and she ended up peeing blood before we got to the airport so I called Boots. They Told us where the nearest public hospital was and advised us to go to A&E. Then they told me to keep all receipts.

The hospital prescribed antibiotics but we needed to buy them from a pharmacy. I photographed the hospital documents and emailed to Boots. The bumpy start was because they couldn't authorise further expenses until the hospital forms, which were in Spanish had been assessed. This took 2 hours, at 11:30pm On a Tuesday evening. I have to say l was impressed. from then on l was advised to either find a hotel or they would do it for me. I decided to do things myself and keep receipts.

A week after sending in my claim form l have been fully reimbursed for Medication, extending car hire by one day (cheaper than taxi's) One extra night 3 star B&B with late check out, 2 flights home, train Travel Gatwick To Luton to collect car from airport and an extra nights car parking at airport. We had no excess to pay because we used our EHIC (E-111) card at the hospital. All of this for a long term pre-existing condition which we had declared at the beginning.

I recently had a 22 day trip to California, while in Boots buying several holiday related items I was asked by a member of staff if I had thought about the "Boots" travel insurance, having looked through the leaflet it was recommended to me that the PLATINUM policy would best suit my needs as I have some expensive camera equipment, iPad and iPhone. unfortunately while on holiday I was (accosted) by a street beggar resulting in my camera being knocked to the ground and damaged. on my return I put in a claim for the repairs, I sent in all the purchase receipts and paperwork as asked for by Boots. By return email I was told my claim had been declined for the reason my camera was over 2 years old, apparently there was a small print under the heading "proof of purchase" explaining anything over 2 years old was not insured. The ironic thing is if I had not sent in the purchase receipts they would have paid out £50.

I have since claimed on my home contents policy with LV and I can't praise them enough, within 2 weeks of me claiming I now have a brand new camera, so if you want to scroll through 44 pages of get out clauses at a cost of £300 the by all means go for the Boots policy, if you only want to pay £16 per month and only have a 3 page policy with everything in clear black and white print with no "HIDDEN" get outs then go for the LV policy.

Tried to buy a travel insurance from boots. Put in my credit card details to be told the transaction did not go though. No policy issued. But they charged me anyway. They refuse to reimburse the money . Steer clear of this company.

We took out a boots travel insurance policy for a trip in Sep 15. But due to circumstances (family death) had to cancel at short notice. Our policy covered us for this so we put a claim in to boots. Because of several delays with the nhs completing the medical certificate we didn't have the paperwork complete until December. We submitted our claim in Dec and quickly received a letter saying that they were looking at the claim, but that the medical cert needed stamped by GP surgery. We promptly returned the stamped med cert. It is now mid April and we have not heard from them. We have contacted them several times by phone but they just keep fobbing us off. They haven't even told us if they will honour the claim. Very disappointed with the service. I am not going to waste any more time with them and will start proceedings with ombudsmen. My advice is not to use boots insurance. If you do and you need to make a claim my advice is to submit claim and then phone ombudsmen immediately afterwards to start complaint otherwise you will be waiting for months.

I purchased my travel insurance from Boots in June and they were very good at giving a quote and taking my cash. There was an issue with my travel and I therefore needed to make a claim.

I sent my claim to their claims department and received no reply not even a "we are working on your claim and will reply in....." So I called them which took a few attempts as the phones said "Busy try again etc". After a number of attempts I got through to someone who said an email had been sent to me but because a particular person was not in that day they can not advise me of the content of the email. How poor is that in today's customer service levels? They said another email would be sent and of course I again did not receive one. From then on I called many times and could not get through. I left messages after the tone as requested (the tone sounded like their voice mail was full and no longer recording). So I emailed them and received a reply saying someone would contact me in 18 to 20 days. They didn't So I called the Boots phone line (the one where you take insurance out) who gave me another number and said they would answer. I phoned all of the numbers given to me and yes no one answered and the voice mail still sounded broken or full with other messages. I then emailed them to an address given to me by Boots and titled it COMPLAINT and two days later some one called me. It appears they had written my email address down incorrectly (poor) and of course do not answer their phones or return calls or emails when contacted direct. The nice lady who called me said they have had difficulties but had taken on more staff and the phone lines were now being answered, I of course advised her that in my experience (two days ago) this is not the case.

The time line for the above is nearly 3.5 months ie September to December and to apologise they offered me a £20 money off voucher which is an insult when I have taken three months to get hold of them.

My advice to customers considering insuring with Boots is DON'T.

My advice to Boots is cancel your contract with your third party supplier because they have damaged your otherwise good reputation.

I will steer clear of Boots from now on both internet and shops.

Travelled to Majorca July 2010 where my sister and son both had very bad ear inffections - it cost us 178 euros to see the doctor and to but medication for them both. We made a claim with boots and received £35 from the claim as they deducted 2 x £50 excesses from the claim and not one even thought there was only one claim!! the service we received from boots was appalling and their claims staff are nothing but incompentant. do not take out boots insureance i will never recomment them and will never use them again although they seen value for money they aren't.