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Trip insurance questions??


rtread

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We are booking through a large firm, and as far as I know, reputable. They offer trip insurance (Crum & Forster) and after checking out their rates was a bit dubious about whether we want insurance or not. (Rates are in the range of 7% of trip cost)

Who buys trip insurance regularly for these cruises? Pros and cons? Please chime in!

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I always buy insurance, not just for the medical coverage, but for the air evacuation.  My standard health plan works worldwide, but they don't cover repatriation and limit ambulance charges (air or land) to $5,000.  I've personally seen three people flown off ships and one taken by pilot boat (2 of them were entertainers) for injuries.  Air evac is notoriously expensive,  but most policies have $100K to $1Million coverage including repatriation to get you back home from the foreign hospital. 

The ancillary coverages of trip interruption, lost/delayed luggage, and limited dental work are icing on the cake.

I've used InsureMyTrip.com to buy coverage in the past and was happy with their service.  If you're taking multiple trips, annual coverage will probably be cheaper.  AllianzTravelinsurance.com, TravelInsuranceServices.com, and SevenCorners.com  are three places worth checking.  For a person 50-59 you can find annual coverage under $350.

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1 hour ago, rtread said:

We are booking through a large firm, and as far as I know, reputable. They offer trip insurance (Crum & Forster) and after checking out their rates was a bit dubious about whether we want insurance or not. (Rates are in the range of 7% of trip cost)

Who buys trip insurance regularly for these cruises? Pros and cons? Please chime in!

Before deciding on travel insurance,  make sure you do your due diligence as they are all not the same. Below is a brief pros and cons synopsis and is not all inclusive:

The pros:

Travel insurance is for emergencies. If your flights are cancelled or you miss them, your insurance can help you get your booking costs back. If you lose your baggage, or if the travel company you’ve booked through goes bankrupt, you may be compensated. Be sure to save the original copy of your airline ticket, hotel booking etc. for filing your claim. If you contract malaria on holiday or have a gall bladder attack while feasting on Peking Duck on your Chinese vacation, your medical insurance policy may not cover you out of network. That is where your travel insurance company can step in to help with your treatment costs. This can greatly lessen your financial load. Cancelled trips due to natural disasters, bad weather or faults in cruise ships can also be covered by travel insurance. If a tsunami causes your hotel to close or if an earthquake causes flight cancellations, you can find yourself paying out of pocket. But if you have travel insurance, it can help you meet most of the costs, if not all of it. Many policies will also provide coverage for stolen, lost or damaged luggage, which can otherwise set you back by hundreds of dollars. Consequently, when you’re buying travel insurance, it’s always a good idea to make sure that your luggage is covered in the policy.

The cons:

However travel insurance can be costly. Despite its benefits, if you have a smooth holiday you will have spent a small fortune on insurance that you won’t need. Sometimes, the price you pay for insurance may not outweigh the cost of your trip. If your trip costs $3000, you spend $150 on travel insurance and then don’t file a claim you’ve already spent 5 percent of your trip budget. If you hadn’t bought the insurance, you could have spent that money on your holiday instead. As a result, many people don’t find the cost worthwhile, and take a chance with the weather, illness or lost luggage. After all, if you are reasonably healthy with no existing medical conditions, a truncated weekend holiday to California or cancelled flights from Amsterdam will hardly be a financial blow. In fact at times, travel insurance may be completely unnecessary. You may not need it if you’re on a weekend golfing trip to Florida. Another problem with travel insurance is that it may not cover everything that you need coverage on. The cheapest insurance usually provides the least cover, and it may not make sense to spend a hundred dollars on coverage that can’t protect you when something goes wrong. Therefore it’s important to read the policy carefully and make sure that the particular issues you want coverage for is covered in it. For instance, if you’re carrying expensive equipment on a policy that only covers $500 worth of it you need to look for another policy. Sometimes, it may make more sense to purchase insurance at lower rates through your credit card company if you’re paying for your holiday with your credit card. If you’re booking through online travel websites, you’ll find that many of them throw up a trip insurance check-box. You can use these, or you can go to other companies online like Allianz Travel Insurance or Travel Guard and get quotes to compare.

The trick is to shop around as you would any other insurance, so you get the best prices and the most coverage. Therefore when you plan your next holiday, decide whether you can afford to lose the cost of the trip if you have to cut it short at the last minute. Does the policy cover what you need, can you afford the premium or is there anyone in the group or family you are traveling with liable to be sick on your holiday? Ask yourself these questions, and then decide whether you need travel insurance or not.

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We always buy this insurance because we too have seen numerous evacuations from the ship by helicopter or Mexican coast guard and ambulances meeting the ship at a port. Unfortunately serious illness and  accidents happen and cannot be handled by the ship doctor. 

Be on the alert for the pre-existing condition clause if you are buying it in case you need to cancel because of some illness which has already been diagnosed. 

 

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I am getting ready to take my second cruise, so I am surely not an expert here. My DW and I are in our early 60s, with the normal 60 year old health issues. I called my medical insurance provider and found that our medical insurance will cover us for our medical needs while on a cruise, but not the med evacuation costs. On my first cruise I hadn't even considered the extremely high costs of being evacuated from the ship in case of a serious issue. 

For me, I was not interested in flight reimbursement in case I needed to cancel, flight delay losses, baggage losses or any of that. While I am not certainly rich, any of these losses would be very irritating and expensive but would not break me financially. A 6 figure medical evacuation could.

My solution to keep down expenses was to purchase trip insurance and claim that the cost of the trip was $0. I still get supplemental medical insurance, $500,000 evacuation coverage (the real goal here), a pretty crummy precondition coverage, and some other, even less relevant coverages. But the cost was only $64 (for $2 more I increased the evacuation coverage to $1,000,000, just in case) for a seven day cruise out of Galveston, with several days in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, far away from any port.

I am content with my decision. I consider insurance a backstop plan to cover real unforeseen emergencies that I cannot prevent, not a policy to make sure that I can change my mind and cancel my vacation for any reason. But that's just me. 

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We are a family of 5 who take multiple trips per year plus I travel for work.  We were paying between $150 to $250 for insurance per trip and so I looked into annual travel insurance.  Our trips vary on who travels from one to five of us.  Most of our trips are free for at least one cabin because of the casino but the other expenses add up.  Five airfares, shore excursions, hotels, etc.  Have we traveled without it? yes.  Do we usually buy it?  yes  We have also used it for things like medical expenses for the kids, trip delay due to airline delay and delayed luggage.  Travel insurance isn't a fix all but it takes the bite out of expenses if something goes wrong.  Different policies have different look back periods for pre-existing conditions so be careful on that.  Also, typically mental illness is not covered so if someone needs hospitalized for this and you are unable to travel it is not covered.

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I will always buy insurance based on our experience.  My family of 4 cruised the Eastern Caribbean in the summer of 2015 (kids were 13 and 8).  I purchased insurance because my husband and I have elderly parents and if something came up, we would have to cancel our trip.  Never in a million years would I think it would be my 8 year old son who would get sick.  We had a medical disembarktation in St. Maarten, my son was in the hospital for 2 days and we had to make new arrangements to fly back to the West Coast.  We had to pay everything up front (over $6,000 -- last minute plane tickets are insanely expensive!) but thanks to insurance, we were reimbursed for everything.  Our insurance was less than $200 through Travel Guard.  Like others mention, be sure you know what your insurance covers before purchasing.

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