Fiona Foster BBC fast:track

With many cancer sufferers finding it hard to find affordable travel insurance, the cancer charity Macmillan is calling on insurers to change the way they assess the risks posed by the disease.

The bitter experience of struggling to find travel insurance for cancer sufferers is a common one to many people.

Fiona McRae battled to get travel cover when she was having treatment for breast cancer five years ago.

The holiday wasn't even costing us that much and I just thought I can't pay £1000 - it's just ludicrous Fiona McRae

"Holidays are things you look forward to and when you're going through this treatment you need something to look forward to," she said.

"But the minute you try to do it, straight away you're slapped in the face and told 'you've got cancer and you're going to have to go through all the hoops to get travel insurance', it can sometimes take the joy out of it."

Ms McRae described being refused cover again and again as "soul-destroying," and according to British cancer charity, Macmillan, she is not alone.

"I think it comes as a shock to a lot of people," said the charity's Helen Rainbow.

"They plan their holiday and at the last minute look to get travel insurance and then suddenly they're prevented from going on something they're really looking forward to and if you've had a really difficult time you really want to get away, so it's a big issue."

High premiums

And as Ms McRae discovered, many companies, if they are willing to sell you a policy, will charge an amount far higher than standard cover.

"I did eventually find cover but they were quoting me over £1000 for holiday cover which should have cost me £20 for family cover, at most. The holiday wasn't even costing us that much and I just thought I can't pay £1000 - it's just ludicrous".

Travel insurance is often the last thought when planning a holiday

So how can extremely high premiums like this be justified? Cancer charities like Macmillan think that very often they can't.

Helen Rainbow thinks insurance companies are not taking into account the personal situation of individuals: "I think often you have a set of questions that are very much if a person has that we can't insure them, but there's no real taking into account what that means and how much of an individual risk that person represents," she explained.

Graham Trudgill of the British Insurance Brokers Association admits that often, mainstream insurers are not sufficiently knowledgeable about cancer to offer appropriate premiums.

"Some insurers aren't really experts in some medical conditions so they don't charge competitively because they're very afraid of the claims they could receive," he said.

"The insurance industry operates a system of risk based pricing so the greater the chance of the claim the greater cost of the premium to pay for it."

Specialist insurance

Ms McRae ended up taking her much needed break with her family but reluctantly, without any travel insurance.

As someone who knows the insurance industry well, her own fruitless search for affordable cover had made her think that there was a better way to provide cover by underwriting to the true risk being posed and not the perceived risk of cancer.

Searching for a specialist broker is the advised route for cancer sufferers

She saw a gap in the market and decided to fill it, setting up her own insurance company to specialise in selling insurance to people with cancer.

And according to Mr Trudgill, wherever you are in the world, finding a firm which understands cancer sufficiently to assess the real risk involved is the key to finding a good quote.

"Go to your national insurance association or perhaps a cancer charity and they can direct you to a specialist broker who can find a fair price for you," he said.

'Distressing ordeal'

But it is not just the fact that finding someone willing to insure you at a reasonable cost can be very tricky, the process itself can be a distressing ordeal.

"I think there's a particular difficulty around determining whether people have a terminal diagnosis and we've had reports of being asked that question in a very blunt way which obviously when you're in that position is very hard to take," Helen Rainbow said.

Cancer charities say it is not just the interests of potential customers which would be better served by some in the industry working harder to treat people with the disease more fairly.

"There's a benefit in recognising that in itself cancer doesn't pose such a big insurance risk because the insurance industry is missing out on a potentially big market," Ms Rainbow said.

"I think it's time they looked at the way they assessed cancer and did something to change that," she added.

It is estimated that one in three of us will suffer some kind of cancer at some stage in our lives so this is a problem many of us are going to have to face.

And if you do, the advice is this: don't go trawling the internet, you need to track down a specialist broker who understands just what the risks - or lack of them - are in your individual case.

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