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OVOODOCORVO
Why Brits got the bug for holiday
sickness scams
British holidaymakers lead the world
when it comes to false compensation claims – and now travel companies are
fighting back. What has caused these nasty ‘gastroenteritis wars’ being fought
across the Mediterranean?
Gavin Haynes
Monday 31 July 2017 18.19 BST Last modified on Tuesday 1
August 2017 09.04 BST
In October 2013, Sean and Caroline Bondarenko spent a week
at the five-star Caldera Palace hotel in Crete. Then they returned home. Three
years passed. According to reports, in September 2016, the pair then put in a
personal injury claim against the hotel for food poisoning. They had allegedly
been so desperately ill that they were asking for £10,000 in damages.
The couple were reported as saying they would never have
made their claim if a claims management company hadn’t encouraged them to do
so. After all, they had only been ill for one day. And only a bit. If the case
had been anything like the vast bulk of gastric illness claims, the hotel
wouldn’t have contested it at all: the couple would have got a cheque to cover
their next couple of holidays.
But it appears that things didn’t turn out that way. In May,
the Caldera Palace opened a countersuit against the Bondarenkos for defamation.
It had evidence from hotel cameras, it said, of the pair actively enjoying
their holiday. And more of the same from the couple’s Facebook feed. The
Caldera Palace is asking for £170,000 in reputational damages. If the suit
succeeds, the Bondarenkos stand to forfeit their Darlington house. They are,
understandably, worried.
“I was horrified when
I saw the court papers, which listed all these negative things we were supposed
to have said about the hotel,” Sean Bondarenko told a Sunday newspaper. “We
never said any of those things. We are terrified for our future, and petrified
we will lose our home.” Their solicitors have denied any wrongdoing.
Unluckily for them, the Bondarenkos have found themselves on
the frontline of the gastroenteritis wars. Over the past couple of years,
foreign hoteliers have begun to identify a new British disease: malingering.
Cehat, the Spanish hotel and apartment trade body, estimates that Brits cost
them €100m in food-poisoning claims over the past three years. By contrast, the
sums from German and French tourists are negligible. One big tour operator
points to statistics from July and August of last year: “There were 750,000
travelling British customers, 800,000 Germans and 375,000 Scandinavians. The
Scandinavians lodged 39 claims for holiday illness and the Germans filed 114.
The Brits put in just under 4,000.”
The Spanish are heavily dependent on the 15 million Brits
who visit the country every year, and are particularly grumpy. The trend has
made front-page news in Spain’s highest-circulation paper, El País, and
featured on Telecinco, Spain’s equivalent of ITV. El País called it “the food
poisoning scam that Brits are using for a free Spanish vacation”, and went on
to explain: “It’s the ultimate traveller fantasy: a seaside vacation with an
all-inclusive hotel deal, and everything free of charge. As it turns out, many
British visitors have made this a reality in recent years, thanks to phoney
claims of food poisoning.”
“Up to now, the Spanish have tolerated the drunken Brit who
pees all over the street in Ibiza,” says Marie Rogers, a senior partner at the
Madrid law firm Rogers & Co. “Because he always pays his bill. But now,
they do the exact same thing and then they get their money back at the end.
They [the Spanish] are not happy.”
What began in Spain has been spreading – first to Portugal,
then to Greece and now as far as Turkey, according to the Foreign Office. “We
work for a lot of tour operator insurers,” says Rogers. “They saw this problem
coming a long time ago. A lot of insurers pulled out and changed their
offerings. The hotels woke up more slowly to it. And the hotel insurers woke up
even more slowly.”
How did we arrive at a 50-fold explosion in gastric illness
claims since 2014? The answer lies with an older “claims farming” industry –
whiplash. With 840,000 whiplash claims in 2015 alone, the UK government has
long been determined to tackle abuse. It set out changes in the 2015 autumn
statement to bust this £1bn-a-year side-industry, including capping lawyers’
fees and payouts.
Claims management companies – often known as “claims
farmers” – stood to lose out. But there remained a loophole: if a personal
injury were to take place abroad, the fees cap wouldn’t apply. Which was when
the question: “What is a form of personal injury that isn’t whiplash and
doesn’t happen in the UK?” began to be asked in earnest.
Of course, the claimant still has to prove their case – but
only on the balance of probabilities. Stir into that the physical distance
across which evidence and lawyers must compete, and you have a recipe for
thousands of easy wins, often administered as class actions by specialist solicitors.
It’s probably not the kind of law the solicitors’ parents
had in mind when they attended their graduations. “But then again,” says one
tour operator who is fighting several cases, “you should see some of these fine
gentlemen – driving some very nice cars around the north-west of England.”
Soon, companies such as market-leader Sickholiday.com were
expanding into TV advertising. The company’s site offers an easy explainer on
how to claim on a no-win no-fee basis: “If you win your case, the only thing you
will have to contribute is 25% of the compensation you are awarded, leaving the
tour operator to pay for your solicitor’s entire basic charges and expenses.”
Sickholiday.com is at pains to point out that it only
handles legitimate claims. “We turn down around five cases a week because we
think they are fraudulent,” says a spokeswoman. “For us to further a case,
claimants must be seen by a gastroenterologist.”
It accuses bodies such as the Association of British Tour
Agents (Abta) of trying to dissuade legitimate claims: “Abta and its members
are trying to hoodwink the public into believing that severe cases of
gastroenteritis and the like are either fraudulent, which they are not, or are
caused by things other than food poisoning, such as a reaction to foreign food
or air conditioning.” Abta replies that it has taken steps to “educate
consumers about the potential consequences of a false claim, and advises customers
with genuine claims on the process to follow”.
Regardless, the compensation business has become highly
competitive. A couple of years ago, claims farmers began approaching tourists
directly in the Mediterranean. In Gran Canaria last September, a “claims
clinic” van was said to have been spotted in southern Tenerife, advertising
their no-win, no-fee services. In June this year, two men were arrested by the
Guardia Civil in Mallorca for allegedly encouraging false claims. Passengers
returning on charter flights often find claims operatives waiting for them with
business cards at the airport, or will perhaps get a helpful phone call when
they arrive home. Jet2, which offers all-inclusive package holidays alongside
its low-cost airline, obtained undercover footage of the touts in action. Be
sure to get a receipt for Calpol or Imodium, say the operatives. That’s all the
proof you need, and we’ll contact you again when you return home.
Upstream from the claims companies, the lawyers who fight the
claims operate at a cordial distance. Some advertise on the web, but it is
illegal in the UK for solicitors to tout for business, so the claims farmers
find customers, often prepping them on the best things to say; for instance,
that they only became ill three days after the holiday began – enough time for
any gastro bug to be solely the hotel’s responsibility. In turn, the claims
companies are normally paid a headline “advertising fee” for a large batch of
good-quality leads.
A standard claimant gets about £1,500 to £2,000, depending
on how many days they have been ill. The lawyer’s fees are uncapped, and can
end up being multiples of that.
As the situation has deteriorated, the Foreign Office has
started to remind travellers, in its “hazards” section for Spain, Portugal and
a few other countries, that “if you make a false or fraudulent claim, you may
face legal proceedings in the UK”. It notes that the maximum sentence is three
years in jail. “Our message to those who make false holiday sickness claims is
clear,” justice secretary David Lidington said earlier this year. “Your actions
are damaging and will not be tolerated.”
In the meantime, the tour operators have sought to make
examples of claimants. Last month, in a landmark case, Thomas Cook opened a
private prosecution for alleged fraud against a Liverpudlian couple who pleaded
not guilty to falsely claiming thousands of pounds for two holidays to the same
resort in consecutive years.
Earlier in July, Julie Lavelle, 33, and her partner, Michael
McIntyre, 34, were told by a judge at Liverpool county court that they would
have to pay Thomas Cook £3,700, having lost their case against the holiday
firm. The judge was told that McIntyre had been seen on Las Palmas airport
cameras sinking six pints of lager despite his claim to be suffering from
severe gastroenteritis. On the flight back, he had ticked “good” or “excellent”
on his feedback questionnaire, although he claimed in court he’d only done so
to be “more likely to benefit from a prize draw incentive” related to the form.
In January, many of the fuzzier legal interpretations were
sharpened in the tour operators’ favour. A case known as Wood v TUI clarified
the standards of evidence. Now, the judge ruled, claimants must prove “that the
food or drink provided was the cause of their troubles”, and that the food was
“not satisfactory”.
Opinions differ on whether the phenomenon has peaked. Last
month, a firm of Manchester solicitors called Law Room decided to drop 3,500
pending cases after Wood v TUI, which, they said, “changes everything”.
Still, in an increasingly paranoid environment, hotels are
starting to put up cameras in dining rooms or asking guests to sign a waiver at
checkout, certifying they weren’t sick. They are even employing stooges to pose
as tourists, hoping to be accosted by claims farmers. “Jet2 have sent their own
detectives down to the key resorts such as Mallorca to try to catch the touts,”
says Humphrey Carter, the news editor of the Mallorca Daily Bulletin.
Holiday firms are taking a keen interest in claimants’
social-media feeds. Leon Roberts, a bodybuilder, was reported to have made the
claim he had been bedridden on a Thomson holiday to Turkey, for 19 days.
However, his Facebook holiday album was said to show 79 counterexamples,
including: dining poolside, drinking beers and munching on steak and flatbread.
In several of Thomas Cook’s high-volume hotels, there is now
a sign by the check-in desk advising guests to notify staff before they leave
of any illness so it can be investigated. “If you look at the claims company
instructions,” says a senior holiday rep with one travel company, “one of the
points in there is that they should notify their holiday rep. So, often they
tell our reps literally as they’re stepping on to the departure bus. Or as
they’re at the check-in desk at the airport.”
The rep says this is the first thing commercial managers of
Mediterranean hotels want to raise with him when he visits. And as tourism has
bunched up towards the western Med after two years of Islamist attacks in
Tunisia and elsewhere, hotel owners have more power than ever over who stays
and on what terms. Which is why there has been talk of banning Brits from
all-inclusive packages – the “all-inclusive” bit is vital as it allows
claimants to demonstrate that they couldn’t have been poisoned at a local
restaurant.
This has been dismissed by Cehat, which is walking a fine
line between cracking down on fraudsters while respecting the vast majority of
British holidaymakers who fill their coffers without trouble. There are also
many in the industry who feel that talking about the issue is only going to
make it worse; that once more tourists hear how much money is involved, they
will treat it as an instruction manual.
Between the dishonest claims and the honest ones – which,
everyone is at pains to stress, do exist – there is a third category: the
merely mistaken. Some in the hotel industry suggest that travellers turn up at
their all-inclusive resort, grab six unfamiliar types of food from the buffet,
eat three plus-sized meals a day, then forget to drink any water, subsisting on
Coke and lager. This, in a 35C heat entirely alien to a British constitution.
Although this is not gastroenteritis, it’s no wonder they’re trotting to the
bathroom.
“What’s really
interesting,” says the senior rep, “is that if you offer to send the customer
for free medical treatment and then offer to pay for the stool sample test,
which you need to prove conclusively it was gastroenteritis, anecdotally, 95
times out of a hundred the customer refuses. Hoteliers are becoming quite bold
in that regard.
“Just two weeks ago, I was dealing with a case in Cape
Verde. There was a woman who began going round the hotel swimming pool on the
last day of her holiday, trying to rally her fellow travellers into claiming
they were ill, explaining to them how this would work. She went to the
authorities, adamant that she had been stuck in her room the whole holiday.
“But the thing is, many hoteliers now can tell when you have
swiped into the buffet room. With electronic keycards, they are able to track
whether people are in their rooms or not. And, besides, the maids routinely log
that info anyway. She hadn’t been [stuck] in her room, and she’d been out
drinking all week. So it was very simple to prove that she was lying.”
The grubby shame of those who are being dragged to court is
the kicker in this morality play about little white lies. It’s about what
happens when we assume that some nameless other – a faceless insurance company,
a huge hotel group – can pick up the bill for our little indulgences. “People
assume that money has somehow been ‘set aside’ in some giant pot, as with PPI,”
says Abta’s Sean Tipton. “That it’s a victimless crime.”
At its most grotesque, the crime itself is the punishment. A
sub-industry has grown up within tourism, a kind of lousy panto of people who
go on holiday for the money. Right now, there will be people up in their twin
rooms with a sea view in Benidorm, lying low, wasting away their sun-kissed
week, emitting a hammy groan every time the maid comes to the door, just so
that they can earn some compensation on their return. Holidays are often what
we punish ourselves with to make everyday life feel more pleasant by
comparison. But that does seem excessive.
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