Peter Greenberg is one of my favorite travel writers, so I wanted to share his list, “Top 10 Reasons for Travel Insurance”, plus my added comments in italics:
- Your flight has been cancelled. I receive calls from guests delayed in airports due to weather, mechanical issues, staffing problems, and more, but there’s very little I can do to help them in most of these situations. Your best bet is to fly in a day early and purchase travel protection. One of my guests was headed to the Bahamas, when her flight was cancelled, and the next flight to her destination on that airline was not until two days later. She called the emergency number for her travel protection, and they had her booked on a flight on another airline the next morning.
- Your bags are lost and your medication is in them. You need to have an emergency prescription filled. Travel protection assists you with lost or delayed luggage, and they’ll help you get your prescription filled wherever you are.
- Your passport and wallet are stolen, and you need emergency cash and a replacement passport. The 24/7 emergency number offered by your travel protection can help arrange a transfer of emergency cash through your credit cards, family, friends, employer, or other source. And, they know exactly what to do if you lose your passport or other travel documents.
- You’re involved in an accident, and adequate medical treatment is not available. I received a call from a friend of a friend, whose elderly father had been hospitalized in South America while traveling. There were two hospitals – one for those who had medical insurance and a pauper’s hospital for those with no medical insurance. Her father had Medicare, which does not cover participants outside the US, so he was admitted to the pauper’s hospital. She wanted to know if I could help her get him back home. I asked if he had purchased travel protection, and she explained that he had always refused to buy it due to the added expense. I couldn’t assist her, and the cost to medically evacuate him back to the US was more than she could afford. This family now faced the stresses of combined health and financial problems, where travel protection could have smoothed the way to get him home for better care.
- You need medical evacuation. The situation described above is one good illustration of this need, but there are others. If you become ill while at sea, you may need to be evacuated from the ship via air ambulance … and they charge that cost to you! And, they only transport you to the nearest hospital. If that’s in a foreign country, you will want to be medically evacuated back to the US and even your home city as soon as you are medically stable.
- You need to cancel your trip due to illness. A couple had to cancel their Alaska cruise of a lifetime a few years ago, when the wife experienced a new health problem the week they were scheduled to leave. With the travel protection they had purchased, they were reimbursed for their vacation expenses, so they simply scheduled another trip after she was better.
- Your cruise line, airline or tour operator goes bankrupt. You need to have your non-refundable expenses covered and to get to your destination. It happens … thankfully, not often. But, if it does, you may wish you had purchased travel protection, so they could pay for the new reservation instead of you.
- A terrorist incident occurs in the city where you’re planning to visit, and you want to cancel your trip. In the US, we don’t think about this possibility often. Enough said!
- A hurricane forces you to evacuate our resort, hotel or cruise ship. Many of my guests buy travel protection for this reason alone, but there are still many who don’t consider this possibility.
- And last but not least, it’s simply worth the extra few dollars to ensure your peace of mind. Trust me, it will make the days leading up to your trip and throughout your travels a little less stressful. In recent months, I’ve filed several insurance claims for guests, and each of them said they would have been even more distressed had they not had that travel protection purchase with their travel documents.