We are sorry to hear that you need to make a claim against your insurance and wanted to make you aware that claims handling is taking longer than normal at the current time.
It is currently taking around 6 weeks on average to process a claim. In general, you won't hear from the claims team until around 5 weeks after your submission when a claims handler picks up your case. We recommend you do not send follow-up e-mails or make chase phone calls to CSA until 6 weeks have passed unless they have contacted you, as, doing so diverts resource from reviewing claims documents.
As with most travel related businesses CSA (the claims handler appointed by the insurer of your policy) had to reinstate their team to normal capacity in 2022. Based on travel expectations in late 2021 they aimed to reach 80% of pre-pandemic staffing level which they did by early 2022.
Since then there have been many large scale surge events in claims including significant travel disruption both around Easter and in the ramp up to the summer holidays and significant numbers of COVID related cancellations due to the latest variant. Since it became apparent that claims levels were higher than anticipated CSA started a large scale drive to increase headcount and reached pre-pandemic numbers in June.
This drive continues and headcount is expected to hit 120% of pre-pandemic numbers by the end of the summer period (we note that significant training is required for a claims handling agent so there is a rolling 2 month process to get new staff ready to handle cases).
As the CSA team has been back to full capacity since June we are seeing slow but steady progress in processing times, and we expect this to continue to improve as new staff join the team over the coming few months.
If you've made a claim online you should get an initial e-mail with your claim number and asking you to provide documents within 24 hours, but, no more than 36 hours. If you haven't, please contact us so that we can check your claim has been correctly lodged.
If you haven't heard from CSA after 8 weeks please contact our support team, and we will escalate your case with CSA to determine the cause of the delay, and find out what has gone wrong.
