As a responsible person, I always buy travel health insurance. That is what happened this time. I have already used Tinkoff insurance several times, but I have never tried it in practice, and recently I had to.
It so happened that my girlfriend and I went to live for some time in a Spanish village with Tinkoff insurance. By village, I mean 10,000 inhabitants, one bus every hour and a half to the big city of Cartagena (220,000 inhabitants). The bus may arrive on schedule, or it may not arrive at all in these one and a half hours. But I’ll get down to business.
The girl had problems with the female part, turned to Tinkoff insurance. They said ok – come to Murcia. There is no transport at all from our village to Murcia. Although the distance is only 80 km, it takes 5 hours to get there without a car. As you can imagine, pain is not the most pleasant thing to do.
We asked why we were not offered a hospital in our village, or at least in Cartagena, since there are several options in both places. Tinkoff said that without options, go to Murcia.
We clarified about the taxi, whether it is possible to go by it. We were told ok, take it, we will compensate. This made me happy, although I really did not want to lose cash. 100 euro taxi there, 120 back. In our time without cash, it is very sad here.
Tinkoff said that a letter of guarantee has been sent to the hospital in our case, we need to come, give our name and passport, and we will be accepted.
We arrived, got to the reception. It turned out that there was no letter. Half an hour later they found it, but the pdf was password protected (some kind of trash). Tinkoff suggested that the clinic staff contact their colleagues (I believe, their assistance).
In short, we stood at the reception and accumulated a line of sick and coughing people behind us, while the girl, on our occasion, called several different places. It took about 20 minutes. And then I typed this into google translate:
Tinkoff replied to this, saying, yes, sorry, the hospital will not accept our letter of guarantee, pay yourself, and we will return it.
Of course, health is more important than money, we had to pay for a doctor’s appointment in cash, but we would not have had enough cash for any additional studies, purely physically. Lucky they weren’t assigned.
Today (05/24/22) the insurance company returned 25,470.44 rubles for 435.8 euros of expenses, at the rate even lower than the Central Bank.
I will omit the correspondence with personal data and post screenshots with the essence. The message seems funny, they say, we did not know, we were assured that everything would be fine. And if I told the insurance company that I didn’t know, for example, that you can’t go skiing without special insurance, would we be reimbursed? Of course no.
Total
- Tinkoff was sent to a hospital 80 km from the location when an insured event occurred, although there were many hospitals closer
- Tinkoff or their assistance (Europe Assistance) has a financial debt or some other financial problems that do not allow clinics to accept their letters of guarantee.
- If this problem is known, why did you sell the insurance, why are you cooperating with this assistance and why were you sent to the hospital?
- We paid almost 6 thousand rubles for insurance, but for 435.8 euros we received 25,470.44 rubles, which is at least 8-9 thousand rubles less than the real exchange rate, and it’s not worth talking about cash liquidity here. What if our problem was more serious? It turns out that if we don’t have money, then insurance won’t help? So insurance is a bummer?
It seems that the insurance company has nothing to present concrete claims for, but the very behavior and attitude towards sick people, in my opinion, is dishonorable.