World Nomads Travel Insurance Review

I recently returned from a trip to Italy for a friend's wedding. During the course of that trip, a travel companion of mine left my dress shoes beneath the passenger's seat of our rental car in Sicily. We did not realize they'd been left behind until we were in Rome, at which point there was no way to have the shoes shipped to me prior to my departure home. The shoes being effectively lost, I was forced to buy a replacement pair as I was a groomsman in the upcoming wedding. I recently filed a claim with all the required paperwork (receipts, dispositions, reports, etc) and was told that through some manner of policy loophole, my shoes do not qualify as lost because they were technically 'left behind.' Seems a little like hairsplitting to me. What is lost, if not left behind? Frankly, I cannot recommend purchasing travel insurance through a company that would resort to this kind of self-serving nitpicking. I'm grateful that only my shoes were 'left behind', i.e. lost, and not something more significant like a backpack full of gear, because this sort of exploitative corporate attitude would be bound to leave me high and dry. I can only imagine the living hell of going through a medical emergency with this company. Lesson learned. I will never again use World Nomads travel insurance nor will I recommend it to anyone. Buyer beware.

Negative experience! I had a medical emergency in Vietnam and wrote to them, among others to request advice about to which hospital to go and which procedure to follow to be able to recover the costs, and they got back to me 9 days later (meanwhile medically treated and recovered!) with a very long email, and not actually answering my questions, but rather highlighting what the insurance does not cover. About any hospital that they recommend for my emergency they just replied “you are free to chose”! Wikitravel was much more useful than their “professionals”. Eventually many of the incurred costs were not recovered as “I have not followed their procedure”. I paid €270 for this insurance, had hospital costs around €320 of which only €90 were recognised by them, of which €70 deducted as "administrative cost for one claim", so I got €20 back from the €320 and this after much dedication to try and understand these guys. Just to emphasise how much I have learned; at the end of my 3 months trip I got my iPad stollen and, although my insurance was still valid, I didn’t bother to claim as I had sufficient experience by then to know it’s a waste of time and energy. What you pay to this insurer can serve only for you to feel responsible and insured during your trip, which works as long as you don’t need it.

My grandmother passed away suddenly. WN paid our costs to go home for the funeral, and then to return to our trip two weeks later. We only filled in one clam form, and payment was in our account 5 days later. No fuss. We were very impressed.

For years I defaulted to the World Nomads site. I thought I was getting value for money. It's a hip funky portal and I wrongly assumed that they would be providing me the best coverage for the best price. Then I found comparetravelinsurance.com.au Well imaging my surprise when World Nomads didn't even come up when I used this site for the first time. And now for the second time. Thanks