What to do if you have an accident abroad
It is not a thing you like to think about when you are jetting off on your travels, but accidents can happen on holiday, and problems like this can be seriously bad news.
Simply having travel insurance is no guarantee that everything will be taken care of. A shocking amount of travel insurance is sold as an ‘add-on’ by travel providers or thrown in as an incentive for signing up to another kind of service. Far too many of these, and other, travel insurance policies are simply not worth the paper they are written on.
Medical care if you get sick or injured abroad can be ruinously expensive, few people know however that it can be possible to make claims for this, in some cases there are even solicitors who will ftake on cases for accidents abroad under UK law.
Tour operators can be sucessfully sued for iunjuries through the UK courts. This is the case even for accidents abroad. There are good reasons to go through the UK system, as the level of compensation is often much fairer.
For all the jokes about ‘holiday tummy’ getting food poisoning in hotel or cruise ship is not funny at all. Getting compensation in these cases is notoriously difficult. The trick is to prove responsibility, experienced solicitors will have a good idea of what will and will not fly in these kinds of cases.
The roads in Britain are actually pretty safe compared to the rest of the world. For one reason or another you are much more likely to be involved in a road traffic accident abroad than here. since 2008 an increasing number of cases for compensation for these kind of accidents have been brought through UK courts.
It is not fun to think about worse case scenarios, but it pays to be prepared.
