Accidents can - and do - happen while traveling. Bags get lost. Travel delays are inevitable. Can you afford the cost or stress of not being protected from all this?

What is travel insurance?

Many people see travel insurance as the same thing as an extended warranty when buying products. Travel Insurance is different. Buying travel insurance is a necessity in this travel environment since post-Covid.

It is an insurance policy that protects you either for a specific part of your trip, such as our flight or your hotel, or it is an umbrella-style travel insurance policy that protects you for your whole trip.  

What does travel insurance actually reimburse you for?  

The best way to explain this is to give some examples of how my clients and I have used our travel insurance. I say there are two types of claims. There are annoying claims, and there are the cataclysmic type of claims.  

Just a couple of months ago, I flew to Thailand. Storms were coming to Dallas, so I arrived at the airport early, and the airline put me on standby on an earlier flight to try to get me out of Dallas before the storms hit and messed up my flights. I did get on the earlier flight. When I arrived in Thailand, I found out my bags were never retagged and were sitting in Dallas with the canceled flight tags still on them.  Just as it took me two days to fly to Thailand, it would also take my bags two days.  What did I do? Since I knew I had travel insurance, I went to a local market.  I bought everything I needed to get through a couple of days.  When I got home, I filed my claim, and my travel insurance covered everything I had spent to take care of myself until my bags arrived.  

Travel insurance also covered major medical claims one of my clients who was in the Maldives recently suffered. She was goofing around flirting with her husband while walking on the boardwalk on the sand and fell off.  When she fell off the boardwalk, she broke her ankle and hit her head on the edge of the boardwalk, causing a nice gash and her being knocked out for a few minutes. Since she probably had a concussion, the resort said she would have to be med evacuated to Male to get to the hospital. Let me make a blanket statement here that medical evacuations will cost you $25,000-$50,000 US dollars no matter where you are in the world. Luckily, she had purchased insurance through us. Her husband just called their 1-800 number for the insurance, and they guaranteed and arranged everything.  Without the travel insurance, they would have been out of their pocket $79,000, devastating their finances.  

How do you choose a travel insurance company?  

Because of the current state of travel, insurance companies are popping up like mushrooms on the Internet. They’ll offer you great prices and tell you you have great coverage. Unfortunately, the fine print will show you are not entirely protected. I have been using the same company for 15 years and selling it to my clients for three years. I genuinely believe in them.    

How do you choose what type of policy to buy? 

Basically, there are three types of policies: a policy that covers a specific part of your trip, a policy that covers a particular trip, and one that will cover all of your travel for a whole year.  

The airlines and cruise ships offer insurance for a specific part of your trip. If you take travel insurance for a flight, that only protects you are usually for that flight only. The same thing happens with the cruise insurance. It only protects you during that cruise. It may not even provide coverage while you are on your excursions in ports.  

 A trip-specific umbrella policy will cover everything associated with that particular trip you were taking.    

A final option is an annual travel insurance policy. I have found that buying an annual travel insurance policy is more economical than a trip-specific one for many of my clients in their 50s and older.  An annual travel insurance policy covers all travel that you take for 365 days. Whether you’re taking a quick trip to Vegas or a six-week trip all through Asia, all of your travel will be covered.  

Another resource to help you understand travel insurance

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