Man wins holiday accident compensation claim for broken leg
A holiday accident compensation claim can be made for a variety of reasons – injuries included. This means that if a person is injured as a result of poor treatment or negligence, then the establishment in charge should be held responsible.
If a wet floor, for example, has caused an individual to break their leg, then this individual is entitled to make a claim against the establishment or accommodation if they so wish to. It is an injustice if a person suffers an injury when on holiday due to poor hospitality care and a lack of health and safety checks.
Any accident that happens whilst abroad can be a traumatic and upsetting experience, especially when an injury ruins an individual’s remaining holiday time. However, it is even worse when the injury sustained whilst on holiday continues to affect somebody’s day to day life once they arrive back home. This was the case for Jeff, who was injured in Tuscany on a wine tasting holiday in July 2009.
Jeff and his wife had been looking forward to their wine tasting trip for a long time. They travelled to Tuscany, where they stayed with three other couples in an old, traditional house, situated on the edge of some vineyards. On the third day of their trip, the group were offered the chance to visit a picturesque nearby town, which was about an hour’s drive away. Jeff and his wife did not have their own car and the owner of the house they were staying in (who had also organised the wine-tasting holiday) said that they would give them a lift in their car. Jeff and his wife agreed, though noticed afterwards that the car had no seatbelts fitted in the back seats. Jeff expressed his concerns, though eventually gave into pressure from the host and the rest of the party, before getting into the car.
About twenty minutes into the drive, it began to rain very heavily. The driver of the car, however, did not appear to slow down. This led to the car skidding into a roadside hedge. Jeff sustained a serious break in his right leg as a result of this car accident. He was taken to the nearest hospital and the break was treated and put into plaster. Needless to say, the remainder of Jeff’s holiday was ruined by this accident as they were not able to visit any other vineyards or even go on a walk in the surrounding area. Jeff and his wife stayed until the end of their holiday and began to wonder about the process of making a holiday accident compensation claim. They decided to look into it and get some proper legal advice on their return to the UK.
It was when Jeff and his wife came home that the real implications of his leg injury began to surface. As a self-employed driving instructor, Jeff was unable to earn a salary for many months. This led to a significant financial loss for Jeff – something they thought that they should also be able to receive some holiday accident compensation for.
After getting the right advice from the right people, Jeff went ahead with making a holiday accident compensation claim. His holiday accident compensation claim was successful and Jeff no longer needed to worry about the loss of salary incurred by his broken leg.
A similar accident happened to Jack in 2010 when he was on a holiday with friends in Ibiza. The villa Jack was renting had a wooden decking area with a Jacuzzi pool in the middle of it. One day after lunch, Jack began to make his way towards the pool, while he was doing so a plank of the wooden decking gave way beneath him and he cut and broke his ankle in several places. Having no experience of compensation claims, Jack was completely unsure of how to go about making a holiday compensation claim – although he believed that he was entitled to a compensation sum. When he returned home with his ankle still in bandages, he looked into how easy it would be to make a holiday accident compensation claim. He found that the process was surprisingly straight forward – more straight forward than he would have previously assumed – and decided to go ahead with claiming for compensation. Jack felt that the villa he had been renting had obviously been faulty; the decking should not have been in such a bad state so that it could break under one man’s weight. With this in mind, he made his holiday accident compensation claim and won a sum of money for his injury.
Both of these case studies should show that if you do suffer an injury abroad, it is important to seek out the correct legal advice, as you may be eligible for holiday accident compensation.