TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands Insurance

I'm starting to hear and read some disturbing stories about insurance following Irma. I am insured through Caribbean Insurers and have done everything they asked..the house has been inspected by an adjuster and they have my builders estimate as requested. When I dropped by the office in RT I was told I had done everything right and they would be in touch..now I wait. I have e mailed twice with no response .. should I be worried???

Did the adjusters estimate mirror with your builders estimate?
Do you know if your insurance company has told you about the under insurance scam going on. I heard that on VG the companies are using $400/sqft to see if you are under insured.
i have another company where the adjuster has been asking more and more questions and trying to say I am under insured. I am vigorously contesting this. I have been told that class action suits are illegal in the BVI.

I am definitely under insured..

Manpot - do you know who your adjuster is? I am also with CIL but found out thru my contractor that my adjuster left the island. Now the claim has been reassigned to a new adjuster so I don't know the implications of that.

I am getting email responses, but very slowly.

Searching for that info. I assumed once the adjuster put in his report and then it was compared to my builder's estimate the process would get started. It would be nice to hear from them! I am sure you are in the same boat as me and spending our emergency funds to get works started..could not leave CRC exposed to the elements!

Manpot I think all of us are in for a long and protracted amount of time before any funds are issued. I am thinking like 3-6 months. I suspect they will come to a guy like you and say they will give you 70% of your builders estimate (assuming they will accept your builders estimate) Then you will tell them 70% is ridiculous and the rat race starts.
On a personal note CIL screwed me out of 300K in a liability suit against me and the villa, which they told me they would not contest and told me to deal with it. I paid 300K out of pocket + 100k for litigation costs
It will be all about negotiations and how tough you want to be. <img src="http://www.traveltalkonline.com/forums/images/graemlins/thumbsdown.gif" alt="" />

I don't envy any of you having to deal with insurance. Since they are basically unregulated, I have a hunch they are going to jerk around every expat who has a claim. Lowball offers and a "so sue us" attitude. I really hope I am wrong but I have a sick feeling after reading a whole lot of posts from BVIslanders regarding settlements, or lack of.

The insurers should not use post-Irma building costs to determine whether you are underinsured for co-insurance. They should use pre-Irma pricing to determine the replacement value for co-insurance and post-Irma pricing to determine the damage.

They are definitely working the co-insurance clauses. I posted an explanation of how co-insurance works as a reply on a BVI Community Facebook and have been answering messages all day. It appears that they were using the before Irma market value to calculate the under insurance figure. In all but two case it was fairly easy to determine the owners had made substantial improvements and failed to increase coverage. Once they told me how much they spent on the improvements the numbers worked out. In the other two I was not able to figure out how they got to the payout.

BTW I was able to find that Nagico is owned by Peek Reinsurers of Hong Kong which about $1 billion in reserves and is owned by a Chinese company with very deep pockets so probably no problem with solvency. Have not been able to find info on Caribbean yet.

CIL is our broker, but policy is with Lloyd’s.