Travel Insurance Mistakes You’re Making – Tips to Stay Covered!

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1. Types of Travel Insurance

  • Emergency Medical Insurance: The most critical type. Covers unexpected medical expenses.

  • Trip Cancellation Insurance: Refunds non-refundable costs if you cancel due to specific covered reasons (e.g., family medical emergency). Note: Unless you have “Cancel For Any Reason” (CFAR) coverage, criteria are strict.

  • Evacuation Insurance: Covers transport to appropriate medical facilities (can cost $100,000+).

  • Baggage Loss/Theft: Covers lost/stolen belongings (often with limits).

2. Top Mistakes & Pitfalls

  • Not Understanding Policy Details: Policies vary wildly (e.g., some cover skiing as standard, others define it as an “adventure sport” requiring extra coverage).

  • Under-Insuring: Medical costs in countries like the US can be astronomical. Nora advises high limits (e.g., “seven figures”) for US travel.

  • Pre-Existing Conditions:

    • Most policies exclude conditions you sought treatment for or had symptoms of within a “look-back period” (e.g., 6 months to 2 years).

    • Loophole: Some policies cover “Acute Onset of Pre-Existing Conditions” (unexpected, unpredicted outbreaks requiring immediate care).

  • Not Carrying Insurance Info: Always keep the policy number, insurer’s name, and emergency contact number on you (e.g., written on a passport photocopy). Share this with travel companions.

3. Claims Tips & Strategies

  • Document Everything:

    • Medical: Keep receipts, hospital reports, and logs of all calls with the insurer (date, time, person spoken to, summary).

    • Belongings: Take photos of expensive items (preferably with timestamps) before travel to prove ownership. Keep original receipts.

  • Pre-Approval: For expensive medical procedures, call the insurer beforehand to get costs pre-approved to avoid denial later.

  • Persistence:

    • Nora’s personal story involved a partner with Dengue Fever in Thailand. She faced errors in reimbursement (wrong currency exchange rates) and initial denials.

    • Strategy: If customer service isn’t helpful, hang up and call again to get a different rep, or politely escalate to a manager repeatedly until resolved.

  • Organization: When mailing claims, create a table of contents, number pages, and keep copies of everything sent.

4. Real-Life Horror Stories

  • Dave & Deb (The Planet D): Dave broke his back in the Peruvian Amazon.

    • Challenge: Getting an air ambulance required a doctor’s sign-off that he couldn’t fly commercially and a receiving hospital with a bed available for spinal injuries.

    • Lesson: You can’t just call and say “fly me home.” It requires massive coordination and paperwork.

  • Mitch: Shattered his wrist in a motorcycle accident in Thailand ($15,000 bill).

    • Lesson: He acted as the middleman between the hospital and insurer to get pre-approval, paying only $250 out of pocket. He set weekly reminders to follow up with the insurer to prevent the claim from stalling.

5. Final Advice

  • Check Credit Cards: Some include travel insurance, but verify if it covers medical/evacuation or just cancellation/baggage.

  • Assess Needs: Consider your destination (high cost vs. low cost), activities (adventure sports?), and equipment value before buying.

We went on an international trip to several countries last fall, and got travel insurance, the one that we were offered on our airline’s purchase confirmation page (Delta & Allianz). It came out to just over $50 each, which seemed reasonable given our itinerary and that our US-based health insurance was very restrictive for overseas use. It covered the usual things, health emergencies, lost luggage, canceled flights, etc.

One thing that it didn’t cover, which hadn’t really occurred to us when we purchased it although in retrospect it probably should have, was war. Namely, in the event of war or conflict, it didn’t cover anything that was affected by it, like canceled flights, hotel reservations we couldn’t keep, trains we couldn’t take, etc. And, what do you know, but a war did in fact break out when we were there.

I won’t get into the details although you can probably guess (and it was just as scary as you can imagine), but it led to our flight back being canceled and our being unable to make some of our hotel reservations on the way back (we had planned on stopping in the other countries on the way back), which, being cheapskates, we had purchased at their lowest non-refundable prices (another lesson learned).

Thankfully, we were able to get full credit for the missed flights from the airline itself even though the flights were technically not refundable, due to the circumstances, and for one of the two hotel reservations we were forced to miss. And we ended up finding alternate flights out several days later on another carrier, for which we ended up paying way more than for our original flights, but which enabled us to make use of our remaining hotel and train reservations and flight back to the US.

So the moral of this story is, research the places you’re traveling to, to determine the various risks involved in traveling to them, both generally and at any given time as circumstances can be fluid, in terms of conflict, ethnic strife, crime, natural disasters, disease, etc., spend a bit more for flight, hotel and other reservations that can be canceled for a full refund, and get insurance that covers extraordinary situations that pertain to your destinations such as war and ethnic and political strife.

And, in case someone thinks that the way to avoid the need for all this is to just not travel to potentially risky places, well, basically the whole world is risky these days for all sorts of reasons, and even the more risky places tend to be relatively safe most often, if you’re careful and take prudent measures, and they can be some of the more interesting places to visit. And, in our case, we had to be in the country where the war broke out, being from there originally and having business to attend to there, plus wanting to see family, enjoy the holidays, etc.

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