Anna Leibenko, a Toronto resident of just 24 years, is stranded in a hospital in Croatia after falling from a boat and hitting her head. Unconscious at the scene of the accident and suffering internal bleeding, Anna is now on life support and in a coma with internal bleeding and numerous head and face fractures.

Anna was taken by helicopter to the nearest hospital in Split, Croatia where she’s been treated, but administrators at the hospital have informed her family that she will be responsible for the cost of treatment if she is unable to deliver health insurance documentation. Unfortunately, Anna didn’t purchase travel insurance.

Anna’s family is now trying to raise the money necessary for an air ambulance to bring Anna home – reported to be $93,000 (CAD) – and to pay her medical bills, which are reported to be over $20,000 (CAD) now.

At Travel Insurance Review, these kinds of new stories are disturbing. It’s important for readers to understand that international travelers like Anna have access to compare travel insurance plans. A week’s worth of travel insurance for a Canadian resident visiting Croatia of Anna’s age would run less than $10.00 U.S. and have:

• Emergency medical – $50,000
• Emergency evacuation – $300,000 – $500,000

Travel insurance plans like these also pay round trip transportation for one person to visit the insured traveler in the hospital, so Anna would have someone familiar with her as she gains the strength necessary to be airlifted home.

While visiting Frankfurt, Germany to see his newborn granddaughter, Bill Lyng, a respected lawyer from Kissimmee, Florida, landed in a hospital just prior to returning to the U.S. and there he’s stayed.

After a two-week visit with their daughter and military son-in-law, the Lyng’s were headed home when Bill was suddenly found lying on the floor in a pool of blood, bleeding from his ear. He was taken to the hospital where he had brain surgery and then follow-up surgeries. Currently in a nursing home and unable to sit or stand on his own, his private health insurance won’t cover the costs to transport him back home.

His wife, Sherie Lyng, has been navigating the sea of red tape and trying to get her husband home but found the cost estimates ranging from $25.000 to $35,000 for medical transport. And an air ambulance, which is what he really needs, would cost $70,000 to $90,000 and the family simply doesn’t have the money.

In the meantime, as they search for a solution, the family has returned to Kissimmee and Bill remains in a German facility.

While it’s difficult to determine the exact details about this very desperate traveler disaster, we at Travel Insurance Review feel completely awful when we hear about situations like these. Unfortunately, they do happen. People get hurt and become ill and not always in the most convenient places or at the most convenient times.

While your coverage back home may be adequate, it’s not going to come through when you need something so specific as a medically equipped air ambulance to fly you home where your treatment and recovery can be continued. We urge all travelers – even those traveling to countries where health care is free – to be sure that they have the ability to get back home no matter what their health condition.

We wish the absolute best of outcomes for Bill Lyng, his wife, and his family.

The family and friends of a young man from New Zealand are working to raise funds to pay for Sean Kenzie’s spiraling medical bills after he was involved in a traffic accident in Phuket.

On June 30th, Mr. Kenzie was riding a motorcycle, a common mode of transportation in the area where he was visiting, when he was hit by another vehicle and suffered a split liver, broken ribs, punctured lungs, and more. He was taken to a local hospital and his immediate injuries were treated.

With his foreign medical bills spiraling higher, the family was horrified to discover that his travel insurance excluded medical expenses that occur from motorcycle accidents. The family reportedly believed that Mr. Kenzie’s travel insurance coverage was ‘full coverage’ and they assumed that meant it would cover everything – even riding a motorbike.

That’s not the way insurance works, however.

No insurance covers everything and all insurance – your home insurance, health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, etc. – has limitations and exclusions that the insured must understand and abide by if their coverage is to be valid. This is also true of travel insurance, which automatically excludes riding motorcycles, scooters, and ATVs, as well as many other activities that are considered ‘high-risk’ by the insurance companies.

See a list of What Travel Insurance Does Not Cover for more details.

At Travel Insurance Review, we are saddened when travelers face disasters like these, and we would like to express our sincere hope for Sean Kenzie’s very best recovery. We would also like to take this opportunity to remind travelers that it’s important to stop and read your travel insurance policy to understand the exclusions.

Sean Kenzie’s family and friends have started a Facebook campaign to raise funds to transport him home and pay for his medical bills. You can check on their progress and contribute at Save Our Mates Life.

A young couple from New Jersey were seriously hurt in a scooter crash while on vacation in the Bahamas last week, but that was just the start of their ordeal. Not having insurance, these travelers were refused medical treatment by hospitals in Bahama and then later in Miami.

Ms. Barreto suffered a dislocated leg, spine fracture, and lacerated liver; and Mr. Gallinella, broken ribs, a punctured lung, and neck injuries. Both were stuck in a regional hospital in the Bahamas for nearly a week before friends, businesses, and relatives gathered funds and garnered a federal emergency loan amounting to thousands of dollars to get them home.

Their passage home on a medical flight cost over $22,000 – both patients had chest tubes and were required to be transported on stretchers.

At Travel Insurance Review, we hate to hear stories like this because these travelers could have saved themselves, as well as their families, friends, and others a whole lot of heartache and worry. They could have saved everyone some hard-earned cash too. Even without having health insurance back home, travel insurance would have cost them very little and they would have had a travel assistance services team on hand to coordinate their medical transportation so they could start their medical treatment immediately instead of languishing for a week while funds were collected back home.

Running their basic trip details through our travel insurance comparison engine:

• Two travelers from New Jersey, ages 36 and 24
• In the Bahamas for a week, no trip cancellation selected
• Selecting a hazardous sports rider (for the scooter-riding)

We chose three different plans from three different travel insurance providers:

For less than $20, these travelers could have had the medical and evacuation protection they so clearly needed and saved their friends, neighbors, and family a lot of worry and fear.

When you look at it like this, travel insurance really does become a no-brainer.

Yesterday, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck southern Mexico, destroying homes, and sending at least 11 people to the hospital. Pieces of buildings crumbled and fell as far away as Mexico City – approximately 200 miles from the quake’s epicenter. The epicenter is not being reported as about 15 miiles east of Ometepec, Guerrero.

Guerrero residents are reporting they felt aftershocks for hours after the initial quake, and news reports now indicate that many residents slept out of doors for fear of their houses collapsing.  Officials are reporting hundreds of homes have been destroyed and many more severely damaged, but the numbers are likely to increase as assessments roll in.

Travelers in the resort city of Acapulco, located about 100 miles from the quake’s epicenter, reported feeling the earth shake and many ran into the streets and out of buildings. Telephone service and electricity were interrupted.

See the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Quake Hazards Program report for the Magnitude 7.4 Earthquake in Oaxaca, Mexico.

We recently read about this travel disaster: A Canadian couple with two children landed in Costa Rica only to be put immediately on a return flight because their presumably valid passports were due to expire in less than three months, which made the passports invalid according to Costa Rican laws. 

A staggeringly long list of people should have informed the travelers of the problem, including their own travel agent and the airline representatives who let the family travel from Syracuse to Chicago before boarding their flight to Costa Rica.  The airline this family flew – United – reportedly faces a hefty fine from the Costa Rican government for bringing passengers with invalid documents into the country, but that won’t help this family recover their expenses.

Travel insurance can’t help them recover their pre-paid travel costs or the unexpected costs they had to pay either. Even though their passports were valid, it’s the responsibility of the travelers to know the passport rules of the country they are visiting.

Many countries have similar passport validity requirements on foreign passports. In fact, in some countries the requirement can be as high as six months. Visitors to some countries (Canada and Australia included) are only required to have a passport that is valid for the duration of their stay.

Entry requirements for each country can usually be found with a search on the Internet.