Travel Insurance

cincy_gal
Tue, 10 Jan 2017 02:15:28 +0000

I’ll chime in with a positive experience.

We often bought travel insurance over our years of travel, and I know that my husband had a few claims when traveling with our son on Colorado ski trips - delayed luggage, missed flight due major traffic on the way to the airport etc.

Just last February, we had a claim for a missed connection on our return from our Caribbean timeshare, resulting in an overnight stay and meals in Charlotte. My MIL was over 90 and in failing health, so I had purchased the travel insurance offered with the airline ticket purchase. Although the missed connection was the fault of American Airlines(a story for another time), American denied us any hotel or food vouchers, but later I did get a chunk of frequent flyer miles from them. The travel insurance was with Allianz Global. I had all our expenses reimbursed within 10 days, including the additional charge for the extra day for long-term parking at our home airport.

For a bike and barge trip in France that we took for last summer, we definitely wanted travel insurance for the medical evacuation protection. After the good experience with Allianz, I perused their options and ended up purchasing an annual travel insurance plan. It covers any trip over 100 miles from home, so it covers a lot of trips for us. Unfortunately, an 80-something friend who was on the trip with us had a cycling accident resulting in a fractured pelvis. He also had Allianz travel insurance, and after a couple of days in a French hospital, he was flown home in first class, with his daughter and a nurse as caregivers on the flight. Allianz paid for the nurse and daughter to fly from the US to accompany him back to the US, and yes, they were in first class with him on the return.

Our annual insurance expires while we will be on another international trip. I will just start another annual plan to begin when the first one expires. Until we are no longer frequent travelers, I will likely continue to have an annual travel insurance plan.