Medical assistance; air ambulance & repatriation; medical escorts; road ambulance and return home and long haul repatriation in the event of death, injury or illness necessitating: hospitalisation; repatriation; alteration to travel plans or curtailment of travel. Immediate contact must be made with the Assistance Company who are available on +44 (0)845 450 3861. If you are travelling to Australia and you require medical treatment you must enrol with a local Medicare office.

We have changed the numbers for the new policy but have not closed down the previous lines. Therefore regardless of when a policy was purchased your customers should be able to contact Global Response without incident.

I have this morning dialled the numbers mentioned on your forum and have found:

Old number
0870 990 3449 works
01204 349743 does not work and we will look into this. It has been removed from the policies in the meantime. The main number appears before this on the wording, which is the number above, and this is the main contact which the policyholder should use.


New Number
0845 872 5412 works
0845 872 5542 is a fax number which does display unavailable when called

Other numbers mentioned
0845 450 3861 This is for IMR, another assistance company we use, who were covering the assistance during the changeover of policies. If a policyholder contacts them they will provide assistance and we will arrange for the case to be transferred if necessary so that it does not affect the policyholder who is seeking assistance.

0845 450 3862 This is IMR’s fax number.

0844 8262644 this is listed as the claims number on the wording and is not a medical emergency number so not sure why this is included in the post.

The number given to the member who first posted on your forum is specific to their policy at the time of its purchase as we were using the general wording whilst waiting for the new policy. They were incorrectly informed that the numbers they had are ‘wrong’ and I will raise this with our Saturday staff member.

All numbers are correct and I will speak to Global Response to find out if they experienced any faults on their line over the weekend.

We would never remove numbers whilst a policy is still in place and if it was imperative to do so we would contact each policyholder to notify them. I'm sorry we were unaware that one of the lines has a fault, however as it is a secondary number our policyholder’s and staff rarely use it.

I have now spoken to Global Response who have confirmed that there were no faults with the line over the weekend. They did explain to me that the telephone exchange in some countries is extremely sensitive to some 08 UK numbers and therefore it blocks you from dialling out by telling you the number is unobtainable. This could vary literally from 1 phone to the next and therefore it is not something that they have any control over. This is why 2 numbers are provided and the 08 number is rerouted to a landline.

We have now been given a new landline number to replace the previous and this will appear on all future certificates.

The number is 02920 468 505. If you could please post both numbers to your forum that would be great. The standard number (and the first one they should try) is 0845 872 5412.