Trip insurance is strongly recommended. Period. It’s for your protection.
- Some or all of the monies you pre-pay for a trip are at risk of not being refunded if you have to cancel your trip because of illness, injury, or death of you, your traveling companion, or a family member.
- If you become ill on your trip or a family member at home becomes extremely ill or dies, it could be very costly if you have to interrupt your trip to return home early.
- It is also very costly if you need special accommodation because of an illness or injury while traveling. For example, if you end up in a body cast, you may need to occupy two seats when you fly home or even be put into the larger seats in first or business class. You would not want to have to pay that extra cost yourself but you would have to in an emergency if you don’t have the right travel insurance coverage.
- If you need emergency medical assistance on your trip, you will have to deal with the expense and bother without any help if you don’t have trip insurance. Remember: Medicare doesn’t cover medical expenses when you travel outside the US.
- If you miss your flight for no fault of your own—as when you are involved in an accident on the way to the airport or the connecting flight you need is cancelled or late—your whole trip can be ruined if it means you won’t be able to get to the cruise ship before it sails or to the tour before it starts. It could be expensive to do what it takes to “catch up” with your trip.
- If your luggage stays behind and you’ve gone to Paris, you will have to deal with the airline to help you get a change of clothes so you can start enjoying your trip. And the airlines really limit how much help they are willing to be in such a case.
What happens to your bucket list dream trip if you become ill or have an accident or if a close family member becomes ill or has an accident before you go or during your trip? Do you lose what you have paid if you have to cancel the trip? Can you afford the extra cost if you have to return home unexpectedly?
You can get insurance at any time up to the date of travel. But sooner is better because you don’t have protection until you buy the insurance. Also, the best level of protection occurs when you buy early enough to have a “pre-existing condition waiver” as part of the policy. A delay in buying trip insurance just reduces the value of the insurance to you.
Travel insurance companies protect you against loss due to unforeseen and unforeseeable situations. Obviously, if you buy a trip knowing that you probably will need to cancel, the insurance company won’t want to insure you because you are a bad risk for them. But if the situation is just one of possibly needing to cancel, then they will insure the trip provided you buy their insurance soon after you make your first payment on the trip; that’s the way they recognize that you and they are willing to share the risk. It’s their incentive to get you to buy their insurance.
Pre-existing conditions. The travel insurance company will allow cancellation due to illness that is part of a “pre-existing condition” as long as the insurance is bought within a given number of days of the initial deposit on the trip. For example, an insurer may require the insurance be purchased within 15 days of the initial trip deposit. This is called a “pre-existing condition waiver.” E.g., if you have been treated for a heart problem in the past, that is a pre-existing condition. If you have a heart attack and need to cancel your trip because if it, ordinarily the pre-existing condition would disqualify you from getting a refund of the money paid on the trip. However, by getting the insurance early enough to qualify for the pre-existing condition waiver, you would be entitled to the refund.
Do you need insurance if you are not spending much money on your trip?
Let’s say you are using your frequent flyer miles to get to your destination and you are staying with friends when you get there. Or that your lodging reservations have lenient cancellation policies. You still should get trip insurance. That’s because you still need the medical assistance provisions and the help with lost luggage. And, since the cost of the insurance is based on the amount of trip cost at risk (hardly anything in this case), you can get those medical and luggage benefits at much reduced cost. Why would you not want trip insurance?
