Accidents Abroad/Passports Don't Get Done in the Sun

Every year, millions of us jet off abroad on holiday.

But if things go wrong, your two weeks in the sun could quickly become a fortnight to forget.

And there are many things that can ruin your precious break,

from cancelled flights to horror hotels.

We were absolutely covered in ants.

They were crawling all over the bed, they were dropping from the ceiling.

Worse still, there are scams, tricks and cons waiting to trap the unsuspecting tourist.

Somebody approached her from the back and grabbed her bag.

But if you know what to look out for,

you can avoid these holiday nightmares.

So we're here to make sure you...

..Don't Get Done in the Sun.

On today's travel itinerary, holidaymakers who face tragedy.

I just said, "Is Glen dead?" He said yes.

And learnt lessons the hard way.

She fell on her head and broke her neck.

And I'll be finding out why

we have to take care of our travel essentials,

watch out for identity theft

and pay attention to who asks to see our passport.

They can be wearing police uniforms.

This has happened on quite a few occasions.

If you're unfortunate enough to have an accident here in the UK,

at least you know there will be a hospital nearby that will treat you for free

but when you're on holiday, things can be very different.

Because when you're in a foreign country,

everything from examinations to ambulances to operations cost money,

but who's going to pay?

When we're on holiday, many of us indulge in far more adventurous activities

than we're used to, but adventure often carries risk.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office often has to support

British citizens who get into trouble while travelling.

Last year there were 3,739 hospitalisations

that resulted from accidents, but there may well be

other accidents that are not reported to the Foreign Office.

But that's the number we actually get involved with through our consular service.

In November 2012, Lee Charie, a business owner,

flew to Thailand for a month-long break to visit friends.

While he was there,

he was to have an accident that would change his life for ever.

Thailand, I just find it to be amazing.

It's just a nice, happy place to be.

It's nice and hot that time of year.

Lee spent the first few weeks of his holiday

blissfully touring the islands of Thailand.

I was out with a few friends, we were just enjoying having some time out of diving courses.

And from that I sort of remember being with people

and saying goodbye to people going to a different island.

And then on December the 18th, everything changed.

Next thing I know is I woke up in hospital.

Lee had fallen headfirst, 27 feet from his hotel balcony,

smashing his skull on the concrete floor below.

The shock of seeing these two policemen in my house

and asking me was I Lee's dad, it was like seeing reruns

of police programmes on telly, it was a horrible, horrible experience.

Lee needed urgent and extensive surgery to relieve pressure

on his brain, which involved removing a portion of his skull.

As soon as we found out what happened to Lee,

we got onto the Foreign Office, who were very good through the whole affair.

Lee had taken out travel insurance when he booked his flight

and his dad, Peter, quickly contacted the agent he'd booked the holiday and insurance with.

I contacted DialAFlight the day after the accident,

just to confirm that Lee had insurance.

They confirmed he did.

The agent had arranged Lee's travel insurance with a company called Towergate Insurance.

They said, "Any problems, we'll be straight back to you",

basically, "Leave it with us".

Lee has no memory of what happened on the balcony

but he needed intensive medical care quickly

so it was crucial that payments were made

to the Thai hospital looking after him.

But his father, Peter, was about to receive bad news.

On Christmas Day when we phoned, Christmas morning,

the hospital told us they were going to discharge him,

the reason being that they hadn't had any payment.

It was then I discovered the insurance company hadn't made any payment

because they wanted a statement from the police and from Lee.

The insurers were not willing to pay out

until they could establish whether Lee's accident was caused by a careless act.

But Lee was still unconscious and therefore unable to provide a statement.

They were also waiting on drug and alcohol tests.

If Lee failed either of these, they would declare the policy invalid.

With no time to waste, Peter had to start giving the hospital money so they wouldn't discharge Lee.

They initially tried to discharge him on Christmas Day.

I made a payment of about just over £2,000 then,

then about two or three days later,

they wanted some more money so I made the same payment again,

another just over £2,000.

Lee's father was at home, worried sick about his son.

He's being asked for money by the hospital.

The insurers are saying, "You're going to have to wait while we investigate."

It just doesn't seem like a very humane way of treating people.

Insurance claims can be very complicated

and when you have to wait for police reports from other countries

and perhaps have them translated, that can take a little bit of time.

The main thing is he's receiving treatment

and the regulator will require that the insurers treat customers fairly

and deal with those claims promptly.

I suppose in Lee's father's case,

the hospital was threatening to discharge his son.

How important is it to insurers

that they make sure that the claim is valid?

Obviously, insurers only want to pay the valid claims,

to be fair to all policyholders.

At £20 a go for a travel insurance policy,

it takes a lot of policies to pay for a major claim.

So they have to make sure they're paying the fair ones

and then they can get it right

for the pricing for all the policyholders.

Peter flew to Thailand to be with his son, and the same day,

the hospital demanded another £20,000.

Extremely worried about how I was going to raise the money.

Thoughts of getting cashback on the house, you know,

everything went through our minds. Horrible time.

I couldn't remember anything because of the...

cos of the...cos of the drugs I had been on.

I wasn't at all aware of what was happening

and how I was affecting other people.

Sorry. Can we stop it just for a minute, please?

One of the scenarios that the insurance company

was investigating was that Lee could have been climbing up

to the balcony from the ground and fallen.

But photographic evidence demonstrated how unlikely

that would be and his alcohol and drug tests came back clear.

So as the insurance company could find no proof

that he breached any terms or conditions,

they organised a payment two weeks after the accident.

In total, Lee's medical treatment cost around £45,000.

We still don't know exactly what happened,

how Lee's accident occurred.

It's happened, it's in the past.

Lee's getting better and that's what we want to concentrate on.

We asked Lee's insurers, Towergate, to comment on his case. They said:

How Lee fell remains a mystery,

but the fact that Lee's accident involves a balcony goes some way

to explaining why his insurance company were cautious.

What should consumers know about balcony accidents?

There have been a lot of them recently, it seems.

Some policies have specific balcony exclusions

so it would not be covered.

Other policies, all policies in fact, will have a general care condition

so you have to take reasonable precautions.

These sorts of accidents have become so prevalent that it's prompted

the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to issue a warning advert.

It's been a lesson to all my friends. Be careful.

This is what can happen. And I'm really lucky. I shouldn't be alive.

The only advice I could give is be sensible, to drink responsibly

and try not to use balconies or if you do, use them sensibly.

What should people remember about...

reckless things like jumping off balconies into swimming pools?

It is a reckless activity.

It's almost certainly not going to be covered by your travel insurance

and the travel company themselves might look on that really unfavourably

and they might ask you to leave and send you home early as well.

It's not unknown in some countries for this to be treated

as a criminal act, particularly when you put yourself at risk,

so it's really not a good thing to do.

I mean, that's the best scenario, is being sent home.

The worst scenario is you're dead at the bottom of the pool.

Absolutely, yeah.

Or paralysed or injured for life as well.

We have seen a number of cases where people have either fell

or jumped and had life-changing injuries,

so they've come back off holiday and spent the rest of their life in a wheelchair.

The cause of Lee's fall is unknown

and the evidence gathered by the insurance company showed it was unlikely he was behaving recklessly.

But his injuries have been life-changing.

Sometimes I feel almost 100%, other times I go through

a proper up and down of emotions

and when I'm feeling bad, I'm feeling bad.

They are making a titanium-alloy, I think, plate to put in here.

That's not going to get done until towards the end of the year.

I get memory loss a fair bit.

But I am finding that literally week by week,

things are coming back, but it's not happening overnight.

So Lee has a slow journey of recovery ahead.

Later on, we meet a family who weren't so lucky.

I just knew and I just said, "Is Glen dead?" He said yes.

You're packing your bag to go on holiday.

What's that last-minute check that everybody does?

Bikini, money and passport. You can't go anywhere without them.

We Brits can be quite the intrepid explorers and we love to go on holiday.

But quite a few of us have trouble keeping our important documents safe.

Big wad of cash, passport. What do you do when you turn up here?

Get drunk.

The singular most common problem relating to UK citizens

travelling abroad is lost or stolen travel documents.

There are 28,000 last year alone and this takes up

a significant amount of time of British Foreign Commonwealth staff.

When you got here, what did you do with your passport?

I popped it underneath the safe.

There's a small gap under the safe and I just slid it in there

because, you know, I'm a farmer, we're a bit skimpy, really.

We don't like spending so I thought I'm not going to pay to put it in.

I'll change next time, I promise!

HE LAUGHS

So how many of us are aware of the risks of having our passports stolen?

Matthew Hirtes is a travel expert living on Gran Canaria

and knows just how valuable they are to the wrong kinds of people.

If somebody took your passport, what could they do with that?

It's identity theft.

Maybe getting people into the country, sex trafficking,

that sort of unsavoury business.

The nature of these crimes means that passports can change hands

on the black market for thousands of pounds.

We heard something about our hotel,

-with things going missing from rooms and stuff.

-Right.

So we had to buy a key for the safe.

Trouble is, in many European countries, we are required

to carry our passports with us at all times.

Couldn't you just carry your driving licence?

The passport is a recognised form of ID over here.

Passports are universally accepted but your driving licence

can be easily forged and is not a legal form of ID in many countries.

I would presume the safest thing to do

would be to put my passport in the safe.

But you're saying I would need to carry it around with me.

A lot of passport theft occurs if you're carrying it in your hands,

walking through a busy tourist area.

So have it within a money belt, for example, within a bag.

So in the safe when down by the pool and stashed away when out and about

but beware who asks to see your passport,

because there is even an identity theft scam where criminals

pose as police officers in order to steal your ID.

They can be wearing police uniforms.

This has happened on quite a few occasions

and the best solution would be to maybe suggest

that you are unhappy with them

and you would like to make a complaint at the station.

That tends to see them disappear quite rapidly.

Other criminals might snatch your bag

and some people running tourist trips or hiring sports equipment

may ask to keep hold of your passport as a deposit.

Our advice is say no.

If your passport vanishes, it's a big problem.

If you're abroad and you lose your passport,

the first thing to do is tell the police because you will need an official record of it

in order to do the rest of what needs to happen

and that will probably involve going to the nearest British consulate

or in some circumstances, you can just go to the airport,

talk to the airline and they will probably talk to the passport office here in the UK,

and then you will find that you are given a piece of paper that entitles you to travel.

That's going to be much easier to do in the European Union

than it is if you're in the far-flung corners of the world.

Keeping your passport safe will mean a stress-free journey home

with it in the right hands,

ensuring you Don't Get Done in the Sun.

No-one wants to think about having an accident on holiday

but it happens to hundreds of us each year

and the aftermath can be difficult and traumatic.

Linda Hudson flew to Turkey in July 2010 with husband Glen,

their daughter Emma and their son Ben, for two weeks of sunshine.

They owned an apartment in a town called Side in Turkey

which they bought in 2005 and holidayed there as much as possible.

We hadn't had a family holiday for a long time

and it was our 25th wedding anniversary so it was extra special.

And Glen was really looking forward to it.

Especially cos the children were coming.

Over the years, Side was like a second home to the Hudsons.

We made friends with all the locals

that lived around us and also the bars, the hotel owners,

they all know everybody over there, they make a point of knowing you.

They are just lovely.

And there was one sport that Glen had a real passion for.

Glen loved parasailing. I can remember the first time he did it.

He went up and came down and said it was the most wonderful feeling.

He said it's peaceful, calm.

You don't feel that you're moving, and he loved it.

Glen had been trying to persuade his daughter Emma

to try parasailing with him this time.

He knew not to ask me cos I hate heights so I wouldn't do it

but he asked Emma and she iffed and ahhed

over whether she was going to do it or not and then she said,

"Come on then. OK. We'll do it." Then we went down the beach.

So there was about three operators, I think, on the beach that day

and we literally just went to the closest one.

In the UK, you would always receive a safety briefing.

The company that we used didn't do anything.

They never went through any safety checks.

They never made them sign anything.

They just literally put them in a dinghy,

took them to the speedboat

and put the harnesses on them and that was it.

Linda sat on the beach below, waiting while her family

enjoyed the ride, but the blissful moment wasn't to last long.

I was laying under a parasol and the next thing,

I heard Emma screaming. Just screaming and screaming.

And I just said, "What's up?" And she said, "Dad fell."

So we run down the beach

and as I did that, the guys that we knew from the restaurant

who had realised what's happened came and got hold of me

and got hold of Emma and he really got hold of me tight

and he kept saying, "You're not going.

"I can't let you go. You can't go down there."

And then just something inside me, I just knew.

And I just said, "Is Glen dead?" And he said yes.

The lanyards on Glen's harness had become so worn

they couldn't take his weight and had snapped,

leaving him to come crashing to the beach below.

And as well as the adventure sport operator

not maintaining their equipment, they had made another major mistake.

When people go parasailing,

they bring them over the land to tout for business

but they are actually not allowed over the land

so Glen fell onto land.

He fell from a maximum height onto the beach...

..and so he didn't stand a chance.

The family believe Glen might have survived had he fallen into water.

While the police dealt with the accident scene and Glen was taken

off to hospital, Linda and Emma were told to go back to their apartment.

Linda never saw Glen again.

I'd have never left Glen on that beach if I was thinking right.

I don't care if he died or not,

there's no way I would have left him on that beach.

Linda's insurance policy covered all immediate costs

following the fall and their friends in Turkey helped the family

deal with all the arrangements needed to deal with Glen's body.

So two days after the accident, the family flew back to England.

I got a phone call to tell me

Glen was coming home by a repatriation company

who told me I needed to pay £500 before they could repatriate Glen

and I had to pay it then.

You do have repatriation on your insurance

but it's not something that we look at.

We tend to look at the medical, and his repatriation didn't cover it.

This was something of a shock for Linda,

that she had to pay the fee to get Glen home.

Eventually, she was refunded the cost to repatriate him.

Her travel insurance was with her bank

and they found provisions to do so.

But many policies do cap how much they will pay out

for certain things so always check the detail.

These repatriations companies, it's just a business.

If you don't pay it, you don't get him home.

Over the coming months, Linda had to pay for flights back and forth

to Turkey and accommodation for court appearances

while the men who ran the parasailing company faced trial.

The owner of the company and the boat driver

were found guilty of criminal negligence

and they were given 22 months in jail.

But how it works in Turkey is that everyone can appeal

and they don't go to prison until their appeal has been heard

so at the moment they're not in prison.

All the trips were a small price to pay to see justice served

for the loss of a much-loved husband and father,

still dreadfully missed by his family.

Emma and Ben have both suffered terribly.

Emma has been having treatment for post-traumatic stress.

Ben can't even face going to see his dad's grave.

It's had a real big impact.

Being involved in a serious accident while you're on holiday

is a nightmare nobody wants to face

so what do you need to know about staying safe abroad?

How can you be sure that the company you're using is a safe one?

If you go to do an adventure activity in the UK,

it usually is regulated or inspected or is subject to some type of law,

which means that the operators really do think through the risk

and try and manage appropriately.

That isn't necessarily the case when you go to certain EU countries and further afield.

Operators can set up and they don't need to have the same

level of skills or experience or the same level of commitment

to your safety as you would see in places like England.

What should you be looking out for?

Or what, if you see it's missing, should you think "this isn't right"?

If that operator doesn't take your name and address at the start,

so they don't know who you are, walk away.

If the kit isn't stored properly or if it looks a bit tatty,

again, I would look at the next operator.

And then if the activities are happening in a crowded space

so if there's lots of swimmers or other activity,

those are some of the key indicators that I would say,

"No, go somewhere else."

I really wish that when Glen had got on,

he'd asked a few questions about health and safety.

"What do I do if anything goes wrong?"...

would be a major one, because they are not forthcoming with the information.

Also, I wish Glen had looked at his harness.

For that to have broken like that,

it must have been in a really poor way.

So if you're taking part in an adventure sport,

choose your operator with caution.

If you're looking for some kind of Kitemark to say,

"this company has international health and safety standards in place", you're not going to find it?

That's why we'd say think about going to UK operators,

go to the local tourist providers

cos they will usually have an informal system where

they've checked these out before they recommend them to you.

But it is a gap and something we have been looking at for a while now.

Is there any prospect of that gap being filled?

It needs to be used by enough providers so that consumers recognise

that so it's one of them that we need to drive through the EU

which by the nature of it takes an eternity to happen, really.

So it really needs some political support.

As Linda's story demonstrates, accidents do happen.

So firstly, who do you tell?

What we would suggest in the first instance

if either an accident or a relative or friend has died,

is firstly to contact the consular service in that particular country.

For all Brits travelling abroad, if something goes wrong

or the worst happens,

the British consulate in that region is there to help.

The difficulty comes when you're on holiday

and perhaps it's a tragic accident. People are not ready.

They are dealing with shock, they are in denial of what's happened

and are in a foreign country in a foreign language.

We are able to help offer the best possible support to the deceased's

relatives or friends who are holidaying with them,

let them get in touch with the UK,

perhaps liaise with insurance companies

or really help sort out

the repatriation of a loved one back to the UK.

Your travel insurance policy can be almost as important

as your passport when travelling abroad.

Here in a hospital in the Algarve, I've met holidaymakers Bob and Ginny

whose holiday has ended in disaster.

So Bob, tell me what happened, and why are you here?

I'm here because my wife had a riding accident.

She was doing a routine ride and the horse slipped

and she fell on her head and broke her neck.

Once you told the insurer then what had happened, how did they react?

Once they knew that my wife had broken her neck, it was all go.

Within ten minutes, indemnity arrived at the hospital to cover treatment

and everything since then has been covered by them.

They tell me it's about 600 euros per day here for basic care,

let alone scans, MRIs, repatriation.

You could have been looking at a five-figure sum

-if you hadn't had insurance.

-At least.

It could be more than 10,000 and quite a lot more than 10,000.

So Ginny will have to stay in hospital in Portugal

for a while longer, but at least Bob can relax, knowing all her treatment is paid for.

So now what are your feelings about travel insurance?

I will always make sure on all my trips that we are both covered.

All our stories have demonstrated how important it is to always check your insurance policy.

What activities can people do, knowing that they are safely covered?

Most activities can be covered under a travel insurance policy,

so things like jet-skiing, parasailing,

even licensed bungee jumping can be covered normally on a travel insurance policy.

It's when you go to the really dangerous circumstances,

so something like kite surfing, which is very high risk,

waterskiing with jumps or unlicensed bungee jumping,

that's when you'd need to refer it to the specialist broker market

to try and find someone to cover that.

How clear is it when you buy your policy

exactly what you are covered for and what you are not covered for?

The policy booklets themselves are very clear

on what is and isn't covered, providing you read it.

Many people click and buy online without looking at the detail.

They're just looking at the price.

And if by any chance you're not insured,

choose your hospital carefully.

If you or a family member does have an accident abroad,

what would your advice be about where to go to get treatment?

I think our advice is to always try to go to the state hospital,

the national hospitals that are there in that country.

If you go to private hospitals, that can sometimes be very,

very expensive and you want to try to avoid that.

Particularly if you're not insured.

For anyone planning a trip involving any sort of risky activity,

Linda has a final word of warning.

We go on holiday, it's lovely.

You're with your family, you're relaxed, you're having fun.

And do you know, the last thing you think about is, "Is that OK?"

You know, you are just too relaxed.

Your mind is in a relaxed mode and there's an old saying,

"You leave your sense in the airport", and I think we do.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd