Travel insurance can help put vacationers at ease for all those unexpected let’s-hope-they-don’t-happen-but-just-in-case moments. However, the biggest issue with travel insurance has been the fine print. Travel insurance companies cover a variety of different emergencies or last-minute cancellations, but it’s important to check each policy to see what exactly and specifically is covered. There is a wide variety of coverage when it comes to travel insurance.
From medical emergencies to forced-to-work cancellations, a variance in policy coverage can range from $40 to several hundred dollars.
Why would anyone add to the cost of an already-expensive vacation by purchasing travel insurance? That’s what I always thought until last December, when we had to cancel our airfare due to my husband’s job. We ended up having to spend an additional $150 each to change flights, when our original airfare had only cost us $230 a piece.
It probably would have been a better bet to splurge for the $50 travel insurance. Lesson learned.
Now that we plan on booking a vacation this summer, and my husband’s schedule is still erratic, I often wonder: is travel insurance worth it?
Travel insurance can be purchased for a variety of reasons: medical, weather, work interruption. But the cost of travel insurance varies most depending on the reason for the coverage. The most important part is to make sure your policy covers the reason you’re purchasing travel insurance in the first place.
The hardest task I’ve found in searching for travel insurance is to be covered for any reason. Our situation is unique in that my husband is actively seeking employment as a firefighter. An interview could come up at any moment, and it’s not like we can just say, Oh can you reschedule for when we come back from our vacation? Thanks!â It is extremely hard to get an interview; there’s no way he could turn it down. And usually these interviews are only booked a couple of weeks in advance, making planning a vacation a nightmare.
The cost of your travel insurance will largely depend on the cost of your overall trip. It will cost more to insure an international $5000 trip than it will to ensure a continental $1500 trip. It will also cost more to get travel insurance with an any-cancellation-reason as opposed to say a medical emergency or weather coverage.
Some great sites to check travel insurance quotes are insuremytrip.com, and quotewright.com. It’s easy to look at several plans at once and compare the cost as well as the benefits.
In most cases, travel insurance isn’t worth it unless you have a specific reason to purchase travel insurance. For example, you may have gotten a great deal on a cruise to the Carribean but it’s during hurricane season. Or you may be going on an adventure vacation with plenty of chances to need medical coverage abroad. In all the years I’ve traveled, I’ve had to cancel travel plans three timesâ”and in most of those cases, I simply ate the cost of the airfare. One time I was deathly sick, another time some other plans came up, and this last time, my husband got a job that required him to start on the day we were supposed to leave on our trip.
Obviously, the best case scenario to save on travel insurance would be to not have to purchase it in the first place. But in the grand scheme of things, what’s an extra $100 to add to the price of a vacation that will help bring you peace of mind throughout your trip?
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