We had some problems with them but it had a happy ending.! :-)

I have always received the best possible service from Amex but this was the first time I bought their Travel Medical Policy .....

To make a long story short I wish to tell Ziners what we did wrong . As I said they finally paid but it took some doing .

While in Italy we had to deal through the office of Mercury International in -London- who is the co writer of the policy, ....

Mercury-London insisted in sending their doctor to the hotel.

We had been taken care earlier at the local hospital so we didn't feel we needed a doctor.... but apparently they had to check the nature of our injuries with their own doctor. So we agreed.

London asked us to pay the doctor out of the pocket= lire 200.000 ( $100 dollars aprox.) in cash.It was late at night, we had no lire,the hotel had no lire to lend us and we were simple exhausted to get the lire at an ATM machine.- So London told us that they could charge our AMex card and that Mercury-US was going to refund us,.. this was our big misstake: we gave London our AMex card's number for the sole purpose ( we believed) of charging 200.000 lire for the Doctor's visit, after all we thought it was the same as if we were dealing with Amex.

As it turned out they charged $271 dollars plus $1404 to our AMex Card.!

Actually it was an Italian company located in Bolzano who charged us.

We of course contested the charges, but it wasn' t that easy,....:-( finally, today we were paid by Mercury-US.-and we in turn have to pay AMex.

The unbelievable part of the story is that we do not know exactly what services were provided to us by this Italian company located in Bolzano, more than 400 kms NOrth of Arezzo!!!.No one told us anything except that $100 were going to be charged for the Doctor's visit.-

We presume that the charges correspond to the Doctor's visit ( obviously overcharged) and for driving us in a van from Arezzo to Rome's airport, ( we had found out locally that cost of a similar ride was aprox. $300).

We learnt the lesson, no matter what :don ' t give your credit card number to any insurance company abroad.-It was like a Christmas spree for this Bolzano guys...

The good news is that we can say that we saved a lot of money with the Amex Travel Medical Insurance because they refunded us other out of the pocket expenses plus they changed our return tickets/ in order for us to return home from ROme instead of Barcelona.

May be we were to naive and no one else would have done the stupid thing we did.... Graziella Miami Beach