This week’s question of the week asks whether you think it’s more important to have travel medical coverage if you’re a certain age, say 60 or 70, rather than if you’re somewhat younger, say 30 or 40?
Is age really a factor in determining whether you get travel medical coverage or not?
Please leave your comments and share your story below.
This week’s question of the week asks if you’ve ever had trouble while trying to buy travel insurance?
Did you find the coverage you needed?
Did you get it at a good price?
Please leave a comment to share your story below.
These days, travelers are offered travel insurance at nearly every turn in their travel planning process – from their travel agents, online booking sites, at the airport – anything to make an extra fee off the traveler.
It’s important to understand, however, that there is a best way to buy travel insurance.
In this post we’ll tell you the steps to your best travel insurance purchase every time you travel.
You know the minute you book your first flight or reserve your cruise, you’re going to be offered travel insurance. Stop right there! The travel insurance offered on booking engines and by cruise lines may not be the right coverage for you. In fact, if you’ve purchased their coverage before, did you even read it to see if you’d have the coverage you need? If your mother or your child is hospitalized, for example, and you want to be by their side, do you have coverage for that trip cancellation?
Many travelers make the mistake of taking the first insurance offered to them thinking it’s one less thing to cross of their list and they can get it done quickly.
Unfortunately, our comment forum is full of travelers who feel they got scammed when that impulse buy let them down and they lost even more money on their trips. The truth is that they took a shortcut and bought a policy they didn’t understand and that didn’t suit their needs.
Figure out what kind of coverage you need before you start booking your trip. Use the information here to select the coverage you need.
Travelers enjoy some big benefits when they buy their travel insurance soon after their first trip booking. Why? Because some coverage in travel insurance plans requires booking within a certain number of days of that first trip booking.
One of the biggest ‘got-chas’ that travelers complain about when their claims are denied is due to pre-existing medical conditions.
Travel insurance companies need to exclude illnesses and injuries that happened before their coverage starts to keep their costs down. If you’re diagnosed with a condition or have a change in an existing condition but didn’t buy your coverage soon after your first trip payment, you won’t be covered if you have to cancel your trip. You can, however, buy pre-existing medical condition coverage as long as you buy your plan early in your trip planning process.
When you look for airfare or hotels, you probably use a comparison engine like Expedia.com or Hotels.com to compare features and quotes and get the right flight or hotel room. It’s the same with travel insurance and it’s the smart thing to do.
Once you know what coverage you need, you can enter your trip dates and a few other details (age, country of origin, etc.) into our travel insurance comparison tool and get quotes from all the major travel insurance providers at once.
Need a specific coverage for your trip? Select that coverage to filter the list of available plans, then review each plan’s details to better understand the coverage. Once you find the right policy, click to buy it and you’ll get your plan documents delivered to your email in minutes.
See our instruction for getting quotes and comparing plans for more detail.
Unique to travel insurance policies, a traveler has the right to review the plan document and make changes or cancel their travel insurance coverage if it’s not right for them. You’ll even receive a refund of your premium (minus a small processing fee in some cases).
The free-look period is the 10-15 day period after you make your travel insurance purchase in which to review the plan details – that means sitting down with a cup of something and carefully reading the policy.
Don’t worry – these policies are not the huge documents you have to understand to get to know your homeowner’s insurance better (you read those, didn’t you?). Compared to those larger, more complicated insurance documents, travel insurance plans are relatively easy to read and pretty short.
Look carefully at these items:
Take a look at our Travel Insurance 101 for more details that can help you buy the right travel insurance policy every time.
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.
