Your holiday insured in under 10 minutes. (Columbus Direct)

Member Name: RussellC

Product:	Columbus Direct
Date:	12/08/00 (2167 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick, simple and a good price.

Disadvantages: None for me.

When it comes to travel insurance it's one of those things I tend to leave till the last minute. Pleasingly web based travel insurance makes this really easy for me, so for my last holiday I went to Columbus Direct's website two days before I flew to Berlin. I have to admit that the only reason I chose Columbus was because it was the only company I could remember from the numerous adds that line the tubes. Fortunately their site is easy to use and the prices seemed very reasonable so there's no complaints from me.

Going to www.columbusdirect.net presents you with a pretty straightforward website, all the navigation is down the left hand side and very easy to use. Travel insurance is right there at the top and selecting it takes you to a couple of pages of forms which effectively guide you through the process of specifying your insurance. You choose the standard options, things like your age, length of holiday and the area of the destination. It's all very straight forward and there's instructions for the fields in case there is any confusion. Once the details have been set the various insurance options are then presented to you, each with a full list of its cover. Getting yourself insured just involves selecting one of these and filling in your payment details. What I like best is that as well as having the details posted to me I can have them emailed as Adobe Acrobat files (PDF format). So I can print them out and insure I have copies of my policy to take with me even if the post doesn't arrive in time. Overall the process took 10 minutes, the next morning when I got into work I checked my email and the documents had arrived.

For 4 days in Berlin I paid £13 for cover that included my money and documents. I can't really comment on how competitive that price is, but it was low enough to keep me happy and going by tube adverts it's comparable with the other companies out there. Neither can I comment on how easy it is t
o claim on the insurance either as fortunately I didn't have to. I suspect it won't be as easy as getting the insurance as this time they're giving out the money. I'll be using Columbus Direct in the future as their site s simple and functional and the whole process was quick and painless.

Summary: