After his $80,000 claim was refused by the travel firm, an Australian man discovered the limits of his insurance the hard way.
Jordan Darney, who appeared on SBS Insight on Tuesday night, revealed his awful incident while on vacation in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2014. Jordan, from Marcoola on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, had returned to his hotel room after a night out with friends when he went out of a window to have a cigarette and dropped four floors to the ground. So we’d usually go outside and smoke on this flat roof… ‘I walked out the fourth window last night and dropped four floors to the ground,’ Jordan said.
‘My companions rushed down, called an ambulance, and I was transferred to Prague University Hospital.’
‘I shattered my pelvis, so both sides were fractured, I broke my elbows, ribs, lung, internal bleeding, my spleen, and had a major concussion,’ she says. He awoke with no recollection of the accident, but it was subsequently determined that he had a blood alcohol level of 0.114.
The blood alcohol level was determined to be’moderate to medium.’
Jordan was unable to fly home due to his horrific injuries since his insurance coverage with Southern Cross Travel Insurance was invalidated after the business realized he had been drinking before to the event.
When questioned whether that quantity of alcohol might nullify a travel insurance coverage, Jordan said, ‘no, not all, and neither did the majority of everybody I’ve talked to.’
‘I believe it was on page 53 of the small print on my travel insurance,’ he remarked.
‘When you go on vacation, you don’t go out to binge drink…you go on vacation to relax and enjoy a drink.’
‘Does having two beers at dinner invalidate your travel insurance?’
Sue, Jordan’s mother, took the earliest available trip to Europe when her son contacted her and her husband Craig to inform them what had occurred.
‘Jordan called from the hospital, and Sue answered, asking, ‘Is dad with you?’ Craig previously told the Daily Mail Australia in 2014. Jordan’s family had to raise the $60,000 required to pay for a specialized medical team to help him on a journey home.
Jordan was unable to sit up for takeoff or landing due to his injuries, and so had to lay on a stretcher for the duration of the journey.
Craig, his father, had enquired about Southern Cross Travel Insurance’s policy terms.
‘I offered a hypothetical inquiry to them, asking whether I would be covered if I went abroad and had a bottle of wine with my wife, and glanced one way before crossing but failed to look the other, and was struck by a vehicle,’ he claimed.
‘They were unable to respond. But that’s the same amount of intoxication as Jordan. I really don’t understand what the world has come to.’