What happens to your travel investment if the B&B where you had reservations is destroyed by fire?

We decided to look into this scenario to find out how travelers can protect themselves. Remember, if you’ve planned a B&B stay, your trip may involve flight costs as well as other pre-paid trip costs, which may or may not be able to be cancelled for a refund. So, when we are speaking about one portion of your trip being destroyed by a fire, i.e., the bed and breakfast, it’s important to recognize that there are other trip costs covered by your trip cancellation coverage.

To start, we researched to find a plan with trip cancellation that included fire in the description of coverage. We quickly found that trip cancellation with Worldwide Trip Protector Gold from Travel Insured International is allowed in this instance:

Natural Disaster at the site of Your destination which renders Your destination accommodations uninhabitable.

… and we further read into the policy definitions to ensure that ‘natural disaster’ included fire and found:

“Natural Disaster” means flood, fire, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, volcanic eruption, blizzard or avalanche that is due to natural causes.

So, at least this plan would allow you to cancel your entire trip in the instance your destination B&B is destroyed – and rendered unhabitable – by a fire.

A word of caution: if the innkeeper gives you a refund for your payment, that amount will be taken out of the amount reimbursed by your travel insurance company, which makes sense.  In many cases, the innkeeper can re-book your stay with a partner inn, and in that case you will not have a covered reason to cancel your trip.

The plan we discussed here is just one plan with this type of coverage. There are many other travel insurance plans that will cover your trip costs if you have to cancel your travel plans due to an inn fire, so if that type of protection is important to you, it’s crucial that you carefully review the description of coverage and remember that the destination lodging must be rendered uninhabitable.

See a full review of bed and breakfast or inn travel insurance.

We recently received a flyer from HTH Worldwide, who offers global travel insurance plans through Travel Insurance Review, and we wanted to share it with our readers.

Last year, a 72-year-old traveler from Florida went to Torremolinos, Spain for a two-month vacation. This traveler purchased an annual plan from HTH: TravelGap Multi-trip Silver (a plan that covers travelers up to age 84 and includes coverage for pre-existing medical conditions). During his trip, he experienced dizziness and suffered a loss of consciousness. He was admitted to a local hospital for diagnosis and treatment.

While this particular hospital did not have a contract with HTH, the administrators agreed to invoice HTH for the traveler’s medical care. After two weeks in hospital, the attending physician released the patient to return to the U.S. but because he was disoriented (due to his condition of Alzheimer’s), the doctor and the HTH team agreed that a nurse would be necessary to ensure he could travel safely. After his hospital discharge, the traveler was medically evacuated to the U.S. accompanied by a nurse and traveled in business class. He was admitted to a local hospital in Florida and placed under the care of his family physician.

HTH arranged for and paid for all the hospital charges in Spain, including the air flight home and nurse escort (image below copied from the HTH flyer).

What can we learn from this traveler’s experience?

A lot of travelers give travel insurance a bad rap because they believe it should cover them in all travel emergencies, but as we’ve shown in this story, travel insurance is sometimes the best purchase a traveler can make.

Unfortunately, travelers typically fail to read their plan’s description of coverage and so they don’t know exactly what their coverage includes and they make assumptions about their coverage. Often, we find that travelers take the easy road, simply purchasing any old travel insurance plan offered to them in the check out process, and then get angry when it doesn’t have the kind of coverage they need.

If you’ve been let down by travel insurance in the past, please review our 5 Common “Loopholes” and How to Avoid Them to better understand how travel insurance works and how to purchase the right travel insurance for your needs.

We recently had a question from a traveler who received a future airline credit for an upcoming trip and we wanted to use it to explain how this works.

This traveler had already paid for the airline portion of their trip. Later, they noticed a price drop and negotiated for a better ticket price. The airline gave this traveler a credit to be used toward future travel, not a discount on the current trip.

This traveler had already purchased their travel insurance as well, was within their free look period and wanted to know if they should reduce their trip cost to account for the future credit.

Why was this savvy traveler concerned? Because they had purchased travel insurance with a pre-existing condition waiver and cancel for any reason coverage – both of which require the traveler to purchase coverage for the entire non refundable charges of their trip. If their trip cost was now reduced, this traveler wanted to be sure their coverage was correct.

In this case, however, because the airline credit was toward future travel and not the currently insured trip, the traveler should not reduce their trip cost.

Had the airline issued an immediate credit on the current trip, then the traveler could lower their insured trip cost to avoid paying for more coverage than they needed.

Holistic health experts remind holiday makers that the holiday season is a time of stress, lack of sleep, reduced physical activity and numerous indulgent holiday foods.

Personal Health Survival Strategies

The following are the top personal health survival strategies for the 2011 holiday season:

1. To avoid big weight gain, focus on maintaining a healthy weight not excessive weight loss. Starting a new diet on January 1st is one option, but it’s not the best option. Focus on maintaining a normal, healthy weight all year long so you don’t have to go through drastic measures in the new year.
2. Enjoy the foods you like – in moderation. No single meal and no single type of food will make you instantly overweight – it’s the accumulation of to many calories too often that does it. Denying yourself your favorite foods is not way to effect a health eating pattern. So, enjoy the foods you like in smaller portions. Savor them slowly and you’ll not only get more out of the enjoyment, you’ll enjoy consuming less.
3. Keep moving through the holidays. With the colder weather, traveling to visit friends and family, and the huge number of commitments, it can be hard to keep your exercise schedule on track. Find ways to sneak in exercise. Craving a long talk with your mother or son? Lace up your shoes, bundle up, and take it outside. You’ll find that the movement will help you focus and enjoy the time with your favorite person and you’ll get a calorie burn besides!
4. Implement smart drinking strategies in addition to smart eating strategies. The human body can’t store alcohol until it has metabolized it. That means your before dinner drink gets metabolized first, then the food you eat. If the body has all the calories it needs right now, the food gets stored as fat. Enjoying a light cocktail with dinner helps the body get the nutrients it needs from the food first. Alternating each drink with two glasses of water helps your liver de-toxify too.

Travel Survival Strategies

Crowded airplanes, lack of service, weather delays, and tired, angry people all contribute to needing a holiday travel survival strategy. The following are the top holiday travel tips for 2011:

1. Make copies of your travel documents and credit cards. If you are robbed or lose your wallet, passport, and other travel documents, you can rely on the copies to help you replace them. Keep one copy in your checked or carry-on luggage and leave one copy with friends or family back home (you can call them if your copy is also stolen).
2. Get there early – really early. Airports can be dull and most people avoid them until they really have to be there, but arriving early gives you the lead time you may just need when the security line gets blocked by someone who hasn’t kept up on the current TSA holiday travel tips.
3. Be nice – even when it’s hard. Your niceness in a sticky, tense situation can have a calming effect on those who are standing by and potentially diffuse the situation.
4. Carry your bag on board – or even better, ship it ahead! FedEx and UPS have decent tracking systems that can help you track the progress of your bag. They’ll even insure it (the airlines won’t). So send everything you can ahead and pack light. You’ll save on airline baggage fees, hassle, and worry.
5. Load up your electronics with plenty of entertainment. This will help tide you over when there are travel delays.
6. Remember where you parked the car. This is especially true during the holidays when you may be sleepy or distracted when you park, then have trouble finding it when you return some days or weeks later. See our tips for finding your parked car.

Of course, having the right travel insurance can help you travel safely without incurring a big financial loss too. See what travel insurance covers and what it doesn’t; then, read our tips for saving money on your travel insurance plan.