Travel insurance- death of policy holder

[Slavetomytoddlers]

I’m just wondering if anyone can help me as I’ve been googling and can’t find anything? Also feeling quite overwhelmed, given the circumstances.

I know the response she will be “it depends on what it says in your policy” but it’s not my policy and I don’t have access to the paperwork.

My MIL died very unexpectedly and quite tragically last week. She was due to travel to America on July 19th and go on a cruise. She’s paid for it in full and took out worldwide travel insurance before booking. From what I can see, she has spent about £8k between the cruise, expeditions, flights, transfers etc.

My husband is her only child (she’s also been widowed for 20+ years) and he has asked me to see what we need to do about cancelling and trying to recoup the money via insurance (back to her estate, obviously- not to him directly).

Does anyone know if travel insurance covers this for sure, or if I need to go directly to the cruise company, the airline, the transfer company etc in the first instance?

Will they even speak to me? We don’t have the death certificate yet as the postmortem and a criminal investigation were required and this has caused a delay.

It was a tragic and very sudden death. While recouping this definitely isn’t our top priority, we’re covering all funeral-related expenses which have amounted to thousands so would like to avoid any other large sums coming out of her estate accounts if possible.

I’m not really in the headspace for it but figure if there’s any chance, it’d need to be done asap and not after the planned departure date.

I think - get angry- has this all been done by email? That sounds like a stock answer and no one’s even really read what you’ve sent! Unbelievably thoughtless. I’m naively surprised that it’s a thing to charge deceased people for a holiday they can’t go on…

I unfortunately recently had to do this for my dad. Speak to travel agent or different companies for parts of holiday (flights, cruise etc) to cancel and make sure you get written confirmation that cancellation results in no refund from each company - they can give you a certificate which states this.

We had to complete a long online form with details of costs we were claiming and upload cancellation confirmation and demonstrate no refunds had been received. We also had to provide death cert and get my dad's GP to fill in a medical form provided by insurance company to confirm my dad's health and pre-existing conditions...that was the hardest bit to organise to be honest, faffing about with GP receptionists.

In my experience, the travel companies were very matter of fact, which I found really upsetting as it was most pressing thing I had to deal with after he died as holiday was only a few days away...on plus side it prepared me for the anger inducing computer says no attitude of utility companies that I dealt with a few weeks later!