Awful experience when trying to claim from RACV Travel Insurance

RACV Travel Insurance is operated by Tokio Marine Management Australasia. When taking out the policy, the service was great. BUT my experience when trying to make a claim has been absolutely awful. Only 4 days before our departure on a long-delayed (due to the COVID-19 pandemic) trip to Europe, my husband suddenly and completely unexpectedly became severely ill, and was rushed to hospital. He was diagnosed with acute, sudden onset leukaemia. He has absolutely no medical history that indicated this would happen. Obviously we couldn't go on our trip, and we made a claim for the lost payments for a cruise on the Croatian coast, and the first couple of nights accommodation which were the only parts of the trip not cancellable at short notice.

All up, we made a claim for around $6000, having paid $977 for the policy, with a $250 excess.

Trying to make the claim has become a nightmare. The approach of RACV/Tokio Marine has been to continually ask for more and more medical information, over a period of more than 3 months. Each time we submit additional medical information, the response comes back that they want more information, or the same information already supplied in a different format.

I have now uploaded into their online claim system (you can't email them) a total of 27 documents supporting our claim (from our GP, hospitals and medical specialists), but once again RACV/Tokio Marine has responded that more medical details are required. They have already been provided with more than 2 years of complete medical records, but have rejected them because their assessor, Manus, says (in a recorded telephone conversation) that patient consultation notes have to be sourced from a digital patient medical record system - which our family GP doesn't have - our GP still writes all his patient medical/consultation notes by hand during each consultation, and has already provided scans of 4 pages of his very detailed medical notes to RACV.

Our GP has also offered several options that RACV/Tokio Marine can use to confirm all the scanned notes provided are genuine. But RACV/Tokio Marine wont accept his proposed verification solutions. In fact, the RACV/Tokio Marine assessor falsely accused me (in a recorded telephone conversation) that "you could have written them yourself" because the medical notes were handwritten by the GP. I strongly objected to being accused of fraud - there was absolutely no basis for this appalling accusation (call was recorded), but the assessor, Manus Bhatt, refused to retract the false accusation.

RACV/Tokio Marine also warns on their claims website that "they are experiencing long delays" and that it can take them up to 20 working days to respond to any messages you send them about your claim. So this means that each time they ask for more information, and you upload more documents into the claim website, it can be up to 20 working days before they turn around a response. Hence our claim has taken more than 3 months of hours and hours of preparing the documents they keep asking for.

All this is despite the fact that my husband's medical specialists (at Royal Melbourne Hospital and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre), as well as his GP of more than 30 years, have provided written confirmation/documentation provided to RACV/Tokio Marine that his leukaemia was completely and totally "out of the blue" with absolutely no prior medical indication or history that this could happen.

Our claim was first lodged on 2 September with RACV/Tokio Marine and 27 supporting documents have been uploaded to their system over this period. But when I provided feedback that our GP does not use a computerised system for patient medical records, and can only provide handwritten notes for the last 2 years of medical consultation notes, our claim was immediately denied by Manus Bhatt.

Sharing this so that others (particularly long-standing, 30+ years RACV Club Members like me) are aware that claiming on RACV Travel Insurance can be a total nightmare. They will deny a medical claim if your GP does not keep their patient medical records in their required format (which they don't specify, and seems to change with each communication) and none of this is mentioned in the PDS.

Several times I asked that they supply a template of the format they require for medical records, but RACV/Tokio Marine advised the didn't have one. Our GP has also offered several options that RACV/Tokio Marine can use to confirm with him that all the scanned medical notes provided are genuine - but they have refused to accept any of our GP's proposed solutions.

RACV, as a 30+ years Gold Club Member, the service provided by Tokio Marine is seriously damaging your brand and reputation as an organisation that purports to look after its members.

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