For an overseas trip of about two weeks – it has been advised that travel insurance to cover potential cancellation and health care needs would be wise. I’ve never purchased travel insurance. I don’t even know who the major vendors are. I’m assuming you don’t get it from the same people who sell auto insurance – State Farm, Progressive, Allstate, etc.
Can anyone educate me on this?
I buy mine through the travel agency I book through or my bank.
I used to never buy travel insurance, and then I had to cancel a trip for medical reasons. There went $2K. That sucked.
Hmm … I checked my bank’s website. I can’t find travel insurance there.
You should be able to get it from the airline. It’s just another of their hidden charges.
Some time back, they made tickets non-cancellable, non-changeable, and non-transferable so that they could pocket your money and resell the seat if you had to cancel your trip. Then they came up with “travel insurance” as a way to get you to pony up some more money up front to get the cancellation that used to be standard.
Another of their recent (?) changes was bereavement fares. It used to be if a family member died and you needed to get to a funeral on very short notice, they offered a special lower price on the ticket. A very nice thing to do. Last time I had to travel for a funeral, they offered me half the retail price of the ticket. At that time, their website was offering tickets for about a quarter of the retail price. If I hadn’t thought to check the website, I would have ended up paying a special bereavement fare of double what everyone else was paying. Not so nice.
You should pay close attention to how much a policy will cover in regards to medical evaluation. The policies offered on Orbitz or Travelocity when you book airfare tend to cover abiut $50k in medical evacuation. If you are going somewhere exotic, you probably want much more insurance. I just bought a policy through a tour operator that includes $300k in evacuation costs. (I’m going to Peru for two weeks.) I believe it was booked through igoinsured.com, but there are literally hundreds of agencies that offer similar coverage. I belive I paid about $75.
You may also want to check whether you have coverage through your credit card. One of the perks of my Visa card is that my medical bills are covered if I’m hospitalized in a foreign country. The hitch is that I have to contact Visa prior to receiving treatment (or whoever is with me can do it).
Yup, I get automatic travel insurance through my bank if I buy air tickets with my credit card. Although the default level of coverage is quite low, I can upgrade it for (the local equivalent of) $40.
I use Covermore, which is not the cheapest, but friends who have had to claim said they were easy to deal with.