This week’s question of the week asks if you’ve ever been called home from a vacation or business trip because someone is sick, something happened to your home or business while you were away, or someone was in an accident?
After that dreaded phone call, how did you handle the emergency travel arrangements?
Did you lose a great deal of money on the trip you had planned?
Please leave a comment to share your story below.
As a site that allows individuals to post reviews of their travel insurance experiences and invites travel insurance providers to respond, we’ve seen our share of angry comments from insured travelers whose claims were denied. We also see angry tweets that label travel insurance companies as fraudulent, crooks, and worse.
While we do not have access to the specific details of any insured traveler’s policy – we only see the comments –  it’s clear that many travelers unfairly label travel insurance a fraud simply because the policy didn’t pay out when the insured thought it should.
Here are just a few of the most recent reasons travelers unfairly labeled travel insurance as ‘fraudulent’ and a ‘scam’ that we’ve seen in our comments and on tweets.
Many insured travelers are shocked to find that travel insurance doesn’t pay for cancelled flights. When you purchase your ticket with the airline and the airline cancels your flight, it’s their responsibility to compensate you, not your travel insurance provider. This is also true of trains, tour operators, and other travel suppliers as well.
If your travel supplier cancels for lack of attendance, lousy weather, or any other reason, they usually offer the traveler the option to reschedule. While this may not be convenient to the traveler, it’s the deal you made with the travel supplier when you purchased your ticket.
Avoiding this problem: know your rights with the airline, train, or other travel supplier. Read their cancellation policies and work with them to get satisfaction.
Many travel insurance claims are denied due to pre-existing conditions, and it’s not just your own health that’s reviewed – it’s the health of the person whose illness or death caused you to cancel or interrupt your trip too.
A pre-existing condition is any condition that a person experienced the symptoms of or had diagnosed prior to their trip. If your mother’s illness was due to a pre-existing condition, and her illness is the reason your trip was cancelled, then the travel insurance company has no responsibility to reimburse your lost trip expenses.
Avoiding this problem: if you, a traveling companion, or anyone you care about enough to cancel your trip has been to the doctor recently, consider purchasing the pre-existing condition coverage with your policy. See our full review of pre-existing condition coverage for an understanding of how it works.
We all know it’s uncomfortable and problematic when we arrive but our bags do not. The airlines have guidelines that allow some monetary funds to be distributed when an emergency occurs, but it’s not required compensation and it’s defined differently from carrier to carrier. In many cases, the airline will ‘compensate’ a passenger with future travel vouchers which isn’t very useful when you need your shoes instead.
Travel insurance also places rules around their baggage coverage and requires that a bag be delayed a certain amount of time before it will reimburse the traveler according to the policy details. It may not sound fair, but it’s explained right in the policy documentation, as shown in this certificate example:
Every travel insurance plan lists the family members that are covered by the terms of the policy, but non-relatives are not covered and, in some cases, some family members are not covered (sister- and brothers-in-law are often not covered). Neither are beloved pets, favorite neighbors, bosses, baby-sitters, or anyone else.
If the person you’re canceling your trip for isn’t listed as one of the covered members in the policy, then your claim will be denied.
Avoiding this problem: if you believe there’s any chance you would have to cancel as a result of a person that is not listed in the policy, then you want to be able to cancel for any reason. Get a travel insurance policy with ‘cancel for any reason’ coverage and be sure to cancel your trip within the plan’s guidelines (typically 48 hours is required for this coverage).
Travel insurance companies, just like every other type of insurance company, has to limit their liability. After all, you wouldn’t expect your home insurance coverage to reimburse you after you deliberately set your home on fire – that’s a claim you would expect to see denied.
Every travel insurance plan has a list of exclusions that apply to the traveler’s trip and understanding those exclusions is critical to understanding how your plan works. Here’s an example of the parasailing exclusion that’s listed in many travel insurance plans:
All kinds of things are typically excluded in travel insurance plans: riding motorcycles, bungee jumping, medical tourism, mental illness, and more – just like setting fire to your own home is excluded under your home insurance policy.
Avoiding this problem: read your travel insurance policy carefully and be honest with yourself about what you plan to do on your trip. If you’re headed to a resort where parasailing is an activity and you think you may want to try it, then get a plan what covers it. Many travel insurance plans allow you to add coverage for ‘adventure’ activities as an option and some don’t even charge you extra if you buy your plan early.
The following are the recommended steps to ensure your travel insurance claim gets paid:
See Making a Successful Travel Insurance Claim for more details.
Many travelers seem to think that if they pay a little and buy some travel insurance plan, they’re covered for anything that happens – anything at all – and that’s really unreasonable. Travel insurance doesn’t cover ‘everything’ that can go wrong on a trip.
Your travel insurance policy is an agreement – a legal contract between you and the travel insurance provider, just like any other type of insurance. When insured travelers are frustrated because a claim is denied, they assume they’ve been cheated but in most cases their claim is denied fairly according to the policy.
We agree that it’s no fun when you buy a travel insurance plan and believe you’re covered only to find out you were never covered at all. This scenario is 100% avoidable if travelers will read their plans and understand the exclusions.
For more information and help understanding the ‘loopholes’ that confuse travelers see our article: 5 “Loopholes†and How to Avoid Them and please, read the fine print of your travel insurance document within the policy’s review period (typically 10-14 days after purchase) so you know you have a plan that will deliver the coverage you expect.
In both the U.S. and abroad, transportation providers of all kinds have rules governing bags that are checked in and carried on.
Here are 5 things every traveler should know about taking baggage on a trip.
Heightened security measures since 9/11, the attempted shoe-bombing, and other threats, have made the rules for what can go into your baggage and what be put on an airplane very strict. Add to that the airline charges for checked and sometimes for carry-on baggage, and you’ve got some of the highest points of frustration for travelers.
Knowing the baggage rules should be simpler than it is, but it’s not. First, there are the TSA baggage rules which are complicated and exhaustive, and then there are the airline-specific rules, which vary from airline to airline and cover:
And finally, there are the exceptions to what can be carried on: breast milk, baby formula, and medicine in amounts that exceed the liquid limits, for a few examples. If you’re carrying anything even a little out of the ordinary, check the websites of the airline and the TSA to learn how to get that item onto and safely off the airplane.
Of course, the airlines aren’t the only ones with baggage restrictions. Amtrak baggage rules, for example, have restrictions similar to those of the airline: limiting the number and sizes of your carry-on and checked bags as well as restrictions on what can go into your bags – no firearms, ice picks, and hazardous chemicals are a few). Be sure to check the websites of the non-airline transportation providers for their rules too.
The treatment of checked baggage is a constant source of traveler complaints and for good reason. While the airlines claim that the rate of lost luggage is always improving, it makes no difference to the person standing alone at the empty baggage carousel.
If an airline loses a traveler’s bag and belongings, that person can file a claim. The Department of Transportation (DOT) requires the airline to compensate the traveler for the value of the bag and its contents up to a maximum of $3,300, but here’s where things get tricky:
It’s for this reason, we recommend you photograph the contents of your luggage before a trip – it can provide a little support to your claim. We also recommend you follow these rules to protect yourself from losses:
It’s hard to say when a bag is well and fully ‘lost’ and not just gone on a different trip than the one you have, so delayed baggage is also a problem. Bags lost for 21 days after landing abroad qualify as lost. The DOT requires the airlines to pay something to the traveler whose bags are delayed, but the airlines are largely left to make their own rules and publish them online.
Most travel insurance plans – even those identified as travel medical plans – offer some level of baggage coverage, which can be more useful on a trip than you might think. For one thing – your baggage coverage is in effect whenever your bag is lost, destroyed or stolen so it’s not isolated to the plane trip.
Of course, baggage coverage with your travel insurance plan also comes with some pretty hefty restrictions, including per-item, per-person, and other limits.
Baggage coverage for truly lost bags is nearly always bundled with coverage for bags that are currently missing so if you’ve got one, you likely have both types of coverage.
While we always recommend keeping your high-value items on your person or in your carry-on it’s not always an option for every traveler, so we tracked down how you can best protect those items from loss, damage, or theft.
Some, but not all, airlines allow you to purchase additional coverage if the possessions you are checking are valued in excess of the airline’s standard compensation.
Some items – cameras, jewelry, electronics for instance – can be more fully covered by adding them to your homeowner’s insurance policy. Often this means a special rider and an additional premium, but the item will be fully covered and you won’t experience the per-item limits you see with airline coverage and baggage coverage with your travel insurance plan.
If you have to send something very expensive or very important from here to there, consider packaging it and mailing it with appropriate insurance cover to it’s destination. Often, circumventing the transportation rules is the best way to get out of this mess entirely.
As winter storm warnings were issued a week or so ago, we’re reminded of all the ways that bad weather can ruin our travel plans. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other ugly weather scenarios sometimes can’t be avoided no matter how carefully you plan.
Still, there are some ways you can minimize how – and how much – the weather impacts your travel plans.
Here are the top 5 ways bad weather can threaten to derail your travel plans (and how travel insurance can help – or not):
When a big storm approaches and there’s plenty of warning, the airlines sometimes allow ticketed passengers to make changes to their reservations and waive the customary change fees. That’s great, but if you have other pre-paid non-refundable trip costs, like non-refundable hotel rooms for example, then you will want to be reimbursed for that loss. This is why it’s important to insure all pre-paid non-refundable trip costs with your travel insurance plan.
When your flight is delayed and severe weather is listed as a covered reason in your travel insurance plan, the travel delay coverage can help you get a hotel for the night, some meals, and other incidentals (up to a per-day limit).
This happened to many vacationers when Hurricane Irene hit the beaches along the east coast. The roads were closed, the bridges were closed, and the ferries were operating only for emergency crew, so vacationers were prevented from getting to their pre-paid vacation rentals on the islands.
Even travelers with hurricane coverage in their travel insurance plans will have a difficult time with their claims if they’ve already left for their trip. After all, trip cancellation coverage ends when you leave for your trip. After that, trip interruption coverage for those who could prove there were no alternative routes to get to their destination was the coverage used to claim their lost trip costs.
Seasonal floods and particularly intense storms cause major problems for homes in some areas and if you’ve invested in a vacation rental where floodwaters are rising, you could be in for some frustration.
Trip cancellation coverage requires that the place you’re renting be uninhabitable, which means it has no electricity, no running water, no roof – that kind of thing. Many vacation rental owners have cancellation or rescheduling policies that cover this, but lots expect that you’ll just endure the mess and come anyway. It’s an important distinction and something to inquire about when you make your reservations.
Only ‘cancel for any reason’ coverage will allow you to cancel your trip when your vacation rental is a mess, but inhabitable, and you don’t want to stay there.
Many travel insurance plans will cover your pre-paid non-refundable trip costs when mandatory evacuations are ordered and you have to leave, but as we’ve noted before it has to be listed as a covered reason in the plan’s description of coverage.
Mandatory evacuations may sometimes be ordered for hurricanes but not often for other weather-related disasters like blizzards. When disaster management teams knock on the door of your vacation home and give you orders to leave, the right travel insurance – one that specifically covers mandatory evacuations – will reimburse your lost trip expenses under the trip interruption coverage if you’re already on your trip or under trip cancellation coverage if you haven’t left yet.
When your vacation is completely ruined by the weather and you can’t see your way through to enjoy another game of scrabble while it pours outside, you may want to abandon everything and head home.
Unfortunately, this is one of those areas where even travel insurance can’t help you. Travel insurance doesn’t consider changing your mind a covered reason for cancelling or abandoning your trip, so you can’t expect reimbursement for your lost trip costs. The only way you have to avoid this is by having ‘cancel for any reason’ coverage and cancelling your trip prior to the deadline (usually 0-2 days prior to departure).
In some parts of the world, the weather is more unpredictable than in others, but there are some things you can do to keep the weather from ruining your travel plans:
We read this tip about the best day to visit theme parks is right after a hurricane. Most locals are busy cleaning up and those traveling in cancelled their trips, so you’ll have the park to yourself!
“Don’t tell Mom†or “Don’t tell Dad†is the default reactionary response any time many of us are about to do something stupid or life threatening. You tell this to your siblings, your friends, and even your more lenient aunts and uncles. It also happens to be something that travelers say after they finish booking their trip to a riskier region of the world and brag to their friends.
Walking that uncomfortable line between wanting to share your travel plans with your loved ones, and heaving them into a puddle of perpetual worry, or leaving them in the dark, and having to keep track of your lies, can get exhausting.
You can choose either path, of course, but telling those who love you where you’re going before you get on a plane to travel to a potentially dangerous location can also be a gift.
Starting with a little research goes a long way to allaying their fears. The fact that you know the risks, often helps them realize you’ve put some thought into this travel plan and it’s not just on a whim. See our 5 Tips for Traveling to Dangerous Countries for some preparation hints that you can use when they ask.
Let’s start with the steps that are necessary to break the news gently while respecting their fear for your safety.
If you get a lot of grief, it’s good to have one card in your back pocket – if you can get it. Talk to other relatives. You know, the ones who are older than those giving you resistance – and dig up the stupid things they did when they were younger. You may have to dig around in the family tree or ask long-time friends for details, but if you work at it you may find your loved ones did some crazy things of their own.
Even if you never share that knowledge with them, it will help you endure their resistance with understanding. Throwing that knowledge on the table could turn things ugly. Use your gift wisely.
When you’re traveling somewhere that your loved ones consider dangerous, you must not do the following or you’ll just make it worse the next time:
Minimize any dangerous encounters you did have while on this trip or it will be harder for them to let you go next time – plus, no one likes to hear ‘I told you so.’ Be sure to send photos and stories of all the great things that happened on your trip! This will help them get used to it before you pick your next destination.
Although many parts of this country have lacked the necessary snowfall for a really great ski or snowboard trip, some have received plenty of snowfall. Of course, there are always other options for excellent skiing as well, including our neighbor to the north.
So, if you, your significant other, your buddies, or your family are planning a ski or snowboard trip this spring, what do you need in the way of travel insurance to be protected?
Let’s go over what coverage you may want with your travel insurance plan and the reasons. Hint: we’ll also tell you where you can save money by avoiding coverage you don’t need.
When you’ve arranged for the airline tickets, lodging, ski passes, rental equipment, transportation and more, stop and add up the total of your pre-paid non-refundable costs. They can be quite significant.
Now, stop and think about whether you can toss that money away if you suddenly, and unexpectedly, have to cancel the trip. If you’re thinking, “I’ll never have to cancel the trip!â€, consider the following scenarios:
Even worse, what happens if while you’re enjoying your trip you’re called home to handle an emergency. Someone is ill or someone is hurt, but you have to get home quickly. Will you lose the remainder of your trip investment?
When we book a vacation, we try to save as much as we can, which means that our airline tickets are often non-refundable, our hotel rooms or other lodging is often non-refundable, and our ski pass purchases are often non-refundable. Sure at least some of these travel suppliers will give you a voucher for future travel, but what about those that won’t – can you afford to lose that money?
If not, take your total pre-paid costs and plug them and the details about your trip into our travel insurance comparison tool and get some quick and easy quotes from many travel insurance providers. You might be surprised to find that you can cover your travel investment for very little extra payout.
After that – and before you choose a travel insurance plan for your snowboard or ski trip – see the remaining points we’ve outlined here.
If you’re traveling abroad, it’s likely you’ll be traveling outside your health insurance network range. What does that mean? In many countries, it means you’ll be paying up-front for your medical care if you hit your head, break a leg, or need stitches while on your ski or snowboard trip. In some countries, they require you to show proof of travel insurance at the border before they’ll let you in!
If you’re traveling inside your home country for your snowy vacation, you may still want to check the travel medical options. After all, if you’re headed outside your health insurance network you’ll be paying the much higher out-of-network costs for your medical care and if you’ve tapped your savings to afford the trip you may not want to put it on your credit card – especially if a bunch of you are in a traffic accident, for example.
Important note: It’s typical for travel medical to automatically be your secondary coverage when other coverage is in effect, but don’t worry. That simply means your own health insurance will pay first and travel medical will pick up the rest – including deductibles from the first go-round.
See our review of travel medical coverage for full information and a list of plans and their coverage limits.
It’s important to understand that with nearly all travel insurance plans the emergency evacuations – medical and non-medical – do not apply when you’re traveling inside your own country.
Unfortunately, in most cases you also cannot separate travel medical from the medical evacuation coverage, so save where you can by getting only the travel medical you think you’ll need and the lowest amount of evacuation coverage.
If you’re headed overseas to enjoy the snow, you’ll want evacuation coverage in case you are badly injured, and repatriation if the worst happens. A medical evacuation can cost anywhere from $50,000 to upwards of $150,000 depending on your location and injuries. This benefit pays for medically necessary evacuations to a medical facility where your injuries can be adequately treated – plus it will take you home when you can safely travel, so you don’t have to worry about re-arranging your return flight.
See a full review of medical evacuation and repatriation coverage for more details.
See also, our recent article: How Much Travel Medical and Evacuation is Enough? for more information.
Travel delays can come in many forms – especially in the cold months of winter. Roads get closed, flights are cancelled, and all that can really eat into your vacation.
Travel delay coverage can reimburse you for unexpected costs like hotels when the flight is cancelled if your trip is delayed for a covered reason. Many travel insurance plans do provide coverage for flight cancellations due to weather, and since the airlines aren’t required to help you out when they can’t fly due to the weather, it’s a good idea to have travel insurance as your backup.
See our full review of travel delay coverage for more details and a list of companies with the best coverage.
The coverage for checked luggage is often confusing to travelers, so we’ll break it down into smaller bits. Many people prefer to avoid the fees imposed on checked luggage by the airlines, but ski and snowboard equipment is simply too big to fit anywhere else, so you have to check it. Most travelers are aware that the airline coverage for lost, damaged, or destroyed checked luggage is limited and there are strong limits on their liability if the contents are expensive.
Travel insurance also places a per-item maximum on items. Specifically, a few travel insurance providers allow up to $2,500 for sports equipment, but most give an insured traveler only $300-$500. If you want extra coverage for your gear, you’ll want to look into a sports equipment rider (it will increase your premium a little).
See our full review of sports equipment coverage to know what to buy and get a list of companies that offer it.
The last step before you finalize your plan choice is to be sure that skiing and snowboarding are covered activities in the plan details. Travel insurance works differently than some types of insurance; specifically, the activity must be included as a covered activity for the insurance to be effective.
If skiing or snowboarding are not covered activities, they’ll be listed in the exclusions in the plan documents.
Don’t worry, if you buy your travel insurance and review the plan within the review period (usually between 10 and 15 days after purchase), you have time to make changes or cancel the plan for a refund. See our tips for 100% confidence in your travel insurance plan.
These days, most people agree that the ‘staycation’ lasts only a year at most and then couples and families typically get back to real vacations pretty quickly.
The old days of being limited to staying in a hotel, however, are long over and many travelers – even solo travelers – have turned to vacation rental properties as a good alternative to hotels.
Vacation rental properties come in the form of single rooms, condominiums, apartments, even entire houses, yachts, tree houses, airstreams, and castles and they come in all sizes and are available nearly everywhere.
Some great sites for finding vacation properties include: Vacation Rentals by Owner, HomeAway, Airbnb, and more.
In addition to the ability to live like a local, some of the most important reasons travelers like vacation rentals instead of the hotel are:
If you’re looking at booking a vacation rental for a Spring Break getaway or thinking ahead to your summer vacation, it’s a good idea to consider your travel insurance options at the same time.
As with any insurance plan, you purchase it to protect yourself from the unknown – those things that can happen, but hopefully don’t happen. This is why we buy car insurance, to protect ourselves in the event of an accident, even one with another motorist who doesn’t have insurance.
It’s also why we buy travel insurance, to protect us from losses that we cannot predict:
Life is unpredictable, and life while traveling is just unpredictable in another location, so it stands to reason that smart travelers protect themselves from expensive losses when they spend a lot of money on a vacation rental.
Many experienced vacation rental property managers offer their guests standard travel insurance with their rental agreement and they’ll include language like this in the contract agreement:
Cancellations that are received in writing between 30 and 60 days prior to arrival date qualify for a 50% refund. There are no refunds for reservations cancelled within 30 days of your arrival date. Travel insurance for unexpected cancellations is recommended to all our guests.
This is a great way to protect themselves, but their travel insurance plan may not protect you as well as it protects them.
Let’s look at some examples – what if:
Even more concerning – does their standard travel insurance plan cover:
If your vacation rental requires a ferry ride to get to the front door, you’re going to want to be sure you can reach medical care if you need it. Sometimes an evacuation is the only way to go about that.
You can spend the time studying their policy and comparing it with other travel insurance plans, or you can plug your trip details into our travel insurance comparison tool and select the options you need while price-shopping among many plans from many companies.
Use the following steps to prepare to cover your vacation in a vacation rental property:
After you’ve chosen your plan, you have a certain number of days (usually 10-15) to review the plan and make changes or cancel it. See Understanding your Free Look Period/Refund Policy for details.
Finally, to be 100% confident you have the right plan, see this topic.
It’s important to note that travel insurance, just like every other type of insurance, doesn’t cover ‘everything’. The following are just a few things that will not be covered with your vacation travel insurance:
For more information about what travel insurance does not cover, see this topic too:
8 Things Travel Insurance Will Never Cover – Ever
In addition, and especially with a vacation rental, your travel insurance won’t cover damage to the rental property itself. Unfortunately, the vacation property owner’s insurance may or may not cover the damage either, and you can be sure that their rental agreement spells out the terms for things like carpet burns, broken furniture, etc. If something gets damaged, you’ll likely have to pay for that yourself.
The minute you have a child, you begin the job of protecting them from accidents and things that can harm them. Once they’re mobile, their world of exploration – and the area you have to baby-proof – grows as fast as they can crawl, walk, or run.
You know you can’t watch them every second and most parents don’t like the helicopter action of hovering over their child every minute. It’s also in a child’s nature to explore because that’s how they learn. You’ve done the necessary work to baby-proof at home, but once you leave the safety of your nest and travel, those safeguards are left behind and you need to repeat the effort at each stop along the way.
Let’s assume you’ve called ahead and asked about the hotel’s available baby equipment, including a crib or pack-and-play. If you ask, many hotels have a baby-proofing service, but just in case they don’t (or they don’t do it well), we’ll go over the risks.
Depending on the amenities of your room, the most likely culprits are:
Many parenting sites have a long list of things you should take along, including baby gates (to corral the kid), safety netting (for balconies), toilet latches, and more. And yet, much of what you need when baby-proofing any room is tape.
Choose your preferred tape – masking, painter’s, or duct – but a roll of tape will go a long way to ensuring you can control many of the risks to your baby’s exploring in a hotel room – many expert travelers prefer duct tape.
See 7 Ways Duct Tape makes a Self-reliant Traveler for details.
It helps to have a partner when you’re doing this because one of you can keep an eye on the kid while the other runs around and does the work, but if you don’t have someone along, put the kid temporarily in the hotel’s pack-and-play or crib. Remove any loose bedding and/or fluffy pillow material many cribs have and make sure the mattress fits snugly.
Once baby is secure, use these steps to baby-proof your condo, inn, or hotel room:
Of course, as a parent you know that these are just the best guidelines we can find and you’ll have to use your well-honed common sense and knowledge about your little person to be sure you’ve covered everything.
You’ll also need to keep an eye on your little one because no matter how good we are at protecting them, they often find ways to put themselves into danger that we never thought of!
