Yeah!  Today I’m flying to New York! I’ll be flying out with members of the London Symphony Chorus to sing in two concerts this week at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall before flying back after our concert on Sunday.  I’ll be back at my desk in time for work on Monday!

Along the way, I had an experience I still find very strange.  And I must confess, it concerns one of my favourite organisations – First Direct.  Over the years, I have regularly taken out travel insurance with them so it seemed quite straightforward to phone them up again, to get put through to their insurers and to renew my insurance.  But no – this is roughly the conversation I had when I spoke to a representative at Aviva:  What’s the purpose of your visit?  I’m going to New York as a member of an amateur chorus to sing in a couple of concerts.  So it’s a professional trip?  No, we’re amateurs – we’re not being paid.  But it’s not leisure…  Well, yes, in my eyes it is – singing is something I do as a hobby.  Quite quickly, I was asked to approach a specialist insurer for this trip.

I found it hard to get any clear explanation about why I would not be insured as a member of the LSC.  I have been insured for business trips under the same policy in the past so even if they were classing this as a professional trip why would this policy not cover it?  I asked the person on the phone what risks he saw that would not also apply on any other leisure trip and he didn’t have an answer.  I decided to let the team at First Direct know I wasn’t happy.  They gave me another number and encouraged me to phone and try again.  The explanation was clearer this time, though I didn’t enjoy it very much.  We don’t class this as a leisure trip because of your singing commitments.  And yes, we do insure people for business trips, but only for work in administration.  I asked if I could check my understanding, expecting to get a simple, yes, that’s right.  Instead, I got another explanation, which seemed to me to be a little longer and still, essentially, the same as the first one.  I could see the risk that we might go round in circles without ever getting to the point where the person talking to me would say, yes, that’s right, these are the reasons why we won’t insure you.

After talking to a few members of the choir (has anyone else had an experience like this?  Who are you insured with for this trip?) I visited my local Post Office, picked up a leaflet for their travel insurance and made a call.  I made sure to check that they really would cover me on my singing trip and the representative seemed rather amused when I told her about my experience with Aviva.  Yes, we’ll cover you for this and other singing trips.

As I sit here and write I am wondering what I needed from Aviva that I didn’t get – recognising that it wasn’t just insurance.  I know I wanted a clear explanation that I could understand – not just that I could understand the words but also that it would make sense to me in a way that the explanation I received just didn’t.  Also I wanted the representatives of the organisation to stand behind their explanation – to act as if it made sense to them.  When I checked my understanding and didn’t get to a clear, yes, that’s right… I found myself wondering if the reasons for the no made sense to the person I was talking to.

And why does this matter?  It matters to me as a customer.  It also matters to Aviva, because customers have a voice – they tell their friends about their experiences, they put it on the internet.  One man, after his guitar was broken in the hands of America’s United Airlines, and having exhausted all the possibilities for raising the issue with them without gaining compensation, wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube under the heading United Breaks Guitars.  At the time of writing, Dave Carroll’s song has received close to 11,000,000 hits on YouTube.

Mmm… maybe I should write a song about Aviva…