Ombudsman News 175

Travel disruption has been a feature of news stories since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Travel insurance related complaints referred to us at the Financial Ombudsman Service have evolved alongside the pandemic.

In our latest blog, Ombudsman Leader, Sian Brightey, outlines some of the complaints trends we’ve seen and highlights some points for insurers to consider when handling travel insurance claims and complaints.

We hear from people who feel their insurer has acted unfairly because the policy wording was misleading, or the insurer refused to pay the claim. We also hear from people that the replacement their insurer provided is a refurbished phone or gadget and not a brand new one.

Our newly published online guidance provides information on the type of complaints we see about mobile phone and gadget insurance and how we resolve them. We also share case studies that illustrate our approach.

Information for consumers  Information for businesses 

Today we published our latest quarterly complaints data on financial products and services. Between July and September 2022, we received 38,470 new complaints.

Our complaints data includes the number of enquiries and new cases we received, and the proportion of complaints resolved in favour of customers.

Our Lead Ombudsman and Director of Casework, Pat Hurley recently appeared on BBC One’s Rip Off Britain to talk about fraud and scams. Pat spoke about our uphold rate in the cases we see and outlined the three main reasons we might take a different view to the bank or payment provider. You can watch the full episode on BBC One's website.

Our refreshed guidance on complaints about fraud and scams shares more detail on the types of complaint we receive, how we can help and case studies examples.

We announced the appointment of Jane Cosgrove to the role of Chief People Officer. Jane will take up her role in January and brings significant experience of transformation, people strategy and operations delivery across private, government and regulatory sectors. Read the full detail in our news update.