Travel Insurance for Dummies...or always expect the worst!

I asked my daughter-in-law to give me the ultimate travel tip the other day. She and my son travel around the world as international educators teaching in Shanghai and putting on workshops for the Apple Corporation in Singapore. Her answer caught me by surprise...Expect the worse was her answer. I had no idea that she felt that much could go wrong because they seem to fly off into the unknown without a thought or fear. EXPECT THE WORSE made me stop in my tracks!

So, what is the worse? Then it began coming back to me...all those stories I had hear from friends. I had even forgotten our very own horror stories. She is entirely right. When we expect the worse, we prepare for it and life can go on while we are on vacation.

I have had my passport stolen by a gypsy in Spain. We were sitting in a restaurant in Plaza Major drinking a beer when a lady walked by with a baby swaddled in a shawl over her shoulder. The purse was gone when I got up to leave. I did not even see it disappear. My passport was gone as well as one of our credit cards. (Thankfully we had been smart enought to make copies of the Passport and had left a credit card in the hotel safe.) In the police station I went to so I could report the theft, a German man sat next to me. He was shaken because a thief had held a knife to his throat demanding his money. The only thing he had left was his cell phone!

A friend of mine waited as her father was evacuated from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean after suffering a stroke. Hurricanes have interrupted other peoples trips as have family illness that did not allow them to leave on the appointed day. We knew people were caught without insurance after 9/11 and had to sacrifice vacation money because they were scheduled to go into what had become a war zone. Many years ago we were caught on the East coast of the USA after the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island malfunctioned.

My husband and I scheduled a trip to Mexico for November to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. We bought trip cancellation insurance because we are not young anymore. We have come to realize the dreaded "worst" can happen even to us.

Travel insurance gets almost 2 millions hits in Google seaches every month. It is big business and as travel increases, will get even bigger. Our timeshare providers offer travel insurance as a part of their service. But, in many cases, we are on our own. So I did a search like any traveler would and I was amazed at the number of companies that there are out there. If you are like me you want the best with the least amount of risk. I always feel that going with a well known name is a good idea. This is what I found.

There are websites that allow you to take a look at a variety of companies and select what you want to pay as well the coverage you need. Within those sites I began looking at each individual company and comparing what they actually provided. One major insurance company feature six benefits:

• Hotel accommodations during trip delays
• Trip cancellations/interruptions
• Lost, damaged, stolen or delayed baggage
• Emergency medical and dental care
• Emergency medical evacuation
• Flight insurance for loss of life or serious accidental injury

Another was aimed at travel in the United States:

Emergency travel and medical assistance worldwide
When traveling in your auto in the U.S. and Canada
Assistance in the event you are a victim of identity theft or fraud
An interactive website offering you and your family healthy ways to stay fit and ready to travel!

There are medical emergency evacuations services. One company features a experienced coordinator who will help you find the medical assistance you need if you are injured or become ill. There are so many choices.

In an article from Consumerist they sited a recap of a Today Show interview by Matt Lauer with Peter Greenberg. In this particular interview Greenburg listed the 9 reasons you might need travel insurance. Here were the 9 situations he found where insurance might be a good thing:

1. Your flight is cancelled.
2. Your bags are lost and your medication is in it. You need to have an emergency prescription filled.
3. Your passport and wallet are stolen, and you need emergency cash and a replacement passport.
4. You're involved in an accident and adequate medical treatment is not available. You need medical evacuation.
5. You need to cancel your trip due to illness.
6. Your cruise line, airline or tour operator goes bankrupt. You need your non-refundable expenses covered and to get to your destination.
7. You have a medical emergency in a foreign country.
8. A terrorist incident occurs in the city where you're planning to visit and you want to cancel your trip.
9. A hurricane forces you to evacuate your resort, hotel or cruise.

If you are rich enough that you can rent a helicopter for a medical emergency or feel that the gods are looking out for you, skip this insurance stuff. Some people feel it is a ripoff and are insulted by being pressured into buying something they feel they don't need. I can understand that. We travel between our winter home and our summer home two to three times a year. I never felt we needed insurance for a 4 hour trip to and from places we were very familiar with...until last winter when a new baby was born with health issues and I needed to change my flight date. It cost me a great deal of money to get that taken care of and our online flight ticket provider quoted a price about 2+ times the amount of the actual ticket to change the flight date. I did get a little help from the airline I was traveling with but not that much. I am beginning to think that every ticket needs at the very least cancellation insurance but I will be weighing the potential loss against the cost for the insurance. For example, if the trip were costing me $5-7000 I would be checking to see what the cost of insurance was. If you are aging with some health issues, insurance is a very good idea. However, if you are making short term plans and don't need to worry about the airline going broke or weather turning on you, skip the insurance. Just use some common sense!

I will always remember my daughter-in-laws advice....ALWAYS EXPECT THE WORSE! When I am prepared I enjoy the best a lot more. I don't know why that is but it is like wearing the right clothes on a very cold day. Protection is very comforting!

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