Does Travel Insurance Cost a Lot of Money? – A question you guys asked me a lot is, why do I even need travel insurance? I mean, it must be expensive, so that’s just wasted money. Travel insurance is actually rather cheap. And I’ll show you that in just a minute.
But first, as I recorded this, we have a real life example of why travel insurance is so important. A guest on a carnival ship who has a history of asthma developed pneumonia during the cruise. The ship’s medical team treated her to the point where they said she needs to go to a hospital. So the decision was made in Montego Bay, Jamaica, at a port stop to transfer her off the ship and send her to a hospital. The ship did not wait.
Does Travel Insurance Cost a Lot of Money?
The cruise continued on, so she was left in Montego Bay, Jamaica, to be treated in the hospital. The doctors in Montego Bay determined that she needs to stay there for 12 to 20 days for her oxygen levels to come back up. Her husband said to be medically evacuated from Jamaica so she could be treated in the United States requires $40,000 in funding. And you guessed it, she has absolutely no travel insurance.
So what does that mean for her and her husband? Well, that means all of their medical expenses and any cost associated with getting back to the United States is on them. They very well may have health insurance in the United States, but very often that doesn’t help you. Once you leave the country, most U.S. based insurance policies do not cover you.
Once you leave the United States to travel, insurance is there to protect you and fill that gap between whatever health insurance you might have and what you would need on a cruise. So you don’t get travel insurance because you’re expecting something to happen. You get it for the unexpected. This poor couple did not intend to get off the ship in Montego Bay and stay there for 20 days and get medical attention for pneumonia.
So how much is travel insurance, you know, that might have helped this couple? I’m going to give you a real example. We are sailing on the Royal Caribbean Symphony of the season, December 20, 22. Now the factors that go into the travel insurance costs include your age, the itinerary, for example, being based in the United States traveling to the Caribbean. It’s probably going to be cheaper insurance than if we go to the Mediterranean, because the flight back, for example, would be much more expensive.
The type of cabin that you have or really the overall cost of the cruise because how much you’re spending on the cruise will have a factor on it.
And of course, what’s included in your policy, for example, there is a clause that says you can cancel for any reason, any time, right up until embarkation day, and you’ll get 100% of your money back. That is expensive. That will definitely raise your costs. We don’t have that.
But here is our actual policy for the upcoming cruise. There’s everything covered in our insurance policy. But I’m going to point out a couple of things. Emergency evacuation and repatriation, $1 million per insured. I just said it’s a $40,000 medical evacuation costs.
If they wanted to transfer the wife from Jamaica to the United States to be treated here in the United States. That is part of that $1 million assurance. We would have been able to very easily fly either one of us back to the United States to get treated here , if we wanted to, using that part of the policy travel, medical assistance.
So there’s somebody at the travel insurance company we can call to help us with all of the travel arrangements.
Now, very often there is a liaison at the cruise line and they may help with some of those connections with the travel.
But here we have somebody at the travel insurance company working for us to help us get home travel, medical expense, $50,000 per insured. So that ambulance, the medical treatment, whatever was done in Montego Bay that would be covered by that $50,000 per insured trip interruption and return transportation. So a few months ago, the Norwegian Escape ran aground in Porto Plata, an unplanned evacuation from the ship. Everybody had to fly home from Puerto Plata.
This is $1,000 towards each of us to get our flight back home.
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And the last item is actually very important, the preexisting condition waiver. You know, whether you know you have a preexisting condition or not, it’s good to add this waiver because in the course of treating you, they may find something that was preexisting and that kind of give the insurance company an excuse to say, oh, you had a preexisting condition.
So we’re either not going to cover it at all or we’re not going to cover it as much if you have the waiver already in place. Well, then they can’t do that so that it our travel insurance coverage for our cruise coming up in December.
Now, the cost of the cruise is about $40-300.
We’re getting a junior suite on the Symphony of the Seas. So that does factor in the cost of the insurance and the cost for all of this coverage for us for a one week cruise in the Caribbean is $156.42, or just under 4% of the entire cruise costs . I think we can all agree that 4% of the cruise cost to protect it from a situation like you just heard about in Montego Bay, Jamaica, is money well spent.
So you don’t need travel insurance until you need it.
So a great resource to find travel insurance is insure my trip.com. This is not a paid sponsorship is to say. That we use when we can’t book through Costco travel to find travel insurance plan.
So please get travel insurance.
You don’t get it for the plan. You get it for the unexpected. So if you ever need it, you have it. Hey, thanks so much for reading.
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