Why you should never travel with Blue-O-Two

[uitlander]

Travelling to and from a holiday is usually quite grim and stressful. The trip out caused jennyh and I to leave Cambridge at 4 am, deal with the lemon sucking check-in clerk at 6 am, be rammed into cattle class for ~6 hours and then faced with 2nd world bureaucracy and queues for 2-3 hours at Hurghada airport on arrival before exiting and finding that

Comments

[major_clanger]

[Disclaimer - these are my thoughts on what you've told me, not formal legal advice.]

From what you say, the driver was doing the best he could for the method being used, so the questions would be whether the method itself was unsafe and if so whether this was to the extent that the risk of harm was foreseeable. It seems to me that you're not sure that the dive company was negligent here, in which case you probably couldn't recover damages for the injury itself, as it would be considered an accident.

As to the handling of your return, it definitely sounds as if there has been very poor support for you. But unless it materially worsened your injury - and that might be hard to prove - or caused you extra expense, your claim would really be based on the unnecessary pain and suffering caused during the journey itself. In effect, your claim wouldn't be for your holiday being cut short, it would be for it being cut short in a more unpleasant way than it could have been had your trip back been handled properly.

My suggestion is that you contact a solicitors who do sports injury and holiday claims; looking online, Slater & Gordon do this and have an office in Cambridge, but I am sure there are others. As soon as you can, write a really detailed narrative of what happened (your posts are a good start) and ask your friend to do the same. The solicitors should be able to advise, perhaps on the basis of an opinion from a barrister more familiar with diving practise, whether there was negligence that led to the injury itself.

Until you've done this, I would be wary of accepting any offer of compensation from the dive company; you wouldn't want to prejudice any potential claim against them.

[uitlander]

Thank you. That sounds like an eminently sensible way to proceed.