Testimonials

Two Travel Agents Wind Up Taking Their Own Advice

Travel agents Pat and Bob Watson faithfully carry their MedjetAssist card on their many travels, and they have always encouraged MedjetAssist protection for their clients. The pair have a newfound appreciation for MedjetAssist since their own brush with a medical crisis on a return trip form Hong Kong. The husband and wife team run Watson and Watson, LTD, in Scarsdale, New York. They were on the first leg of their journey home from an overseas symposium for Virtuoso Travel Agents when something went terribly wrong.

“We were on a plane from Hong Kong to London,” Bob recalls. “Pat had been feeling tired, but we didn’t think anything of it. She fell asleep on the plane, but when she woke up about two hours into the flight, she wasn’t feeling well. She wanted to use the bathroom, but she couldn’t stand up. I noticed a little slurring of her speech and that her right arm was not moving. I knew right away it was a stroke.”

The crew members and a medical-student passenger on the plane were very helpful, but it was too far into the journey to return to Hong Kong, so the plane flew on. In London, an ambulance was waiting to take Pat to a national health plan hospital near Heathrow Airport. She was assigned a bed in a ward with seven other people.

Rather than trying to move Pat to a private hospital in London, Bob wanted to bring her home. He called MedjetAssist, and two hours later, a medically equipped jet and team were on the way to retrieve the couple from London for their journey home.

“I think there is a misconception about the services offered by MedjetAssist,” Bob says now, as he reflects on the experience. “People think they are getting the same services with a platinum card or certain other evacuation services, but it isn’t the same. With proper verification, MedjetAssist will bring you to your home hospital, but those other plans will only take you to the nearest hospital that they feel is qualified to treat your condition.”

“That is a very important difference,” he stresses. “I didn’t recognize the importance of it until this experience – but now I do. You have to read the fine print, which I never did before. If you just scan the information on other plans, you’ll see they talk about medical evacuation, but you have to read further to find out where exactly they are willing to take you and to what end.”

Now, Bob and Pat joke that they have become MedjetAssist evangelists. “For what the membership costs, it would be just plain stupid to travel without it,” Bob says. “The people from MedjetAssist were just terrific. They didn’t leave anything for us to do. The staff, pilot, doctors and nurses took care of every detail from the moment we called MedjetAssist until we settled in at the hospital at home in White Plains, New York. They are wonderful people, and they made us feel so good at a time when we really needed reassurance.”

Bob adds that Pat is recovering well under the care of her doctors and therapists in New York, and she has even returned to work several days each week.

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