The holiday travel season is coming up fast and money is tight.
After so many pandemic delays and cancellations you may be tempted to click and purchase some add-on travel insurance when booking a flight or trip online.
But in most cases, the coverage isn’t worth the money. Kevin Brasler, Executive Editor with Boston Consumers’ Checkbook said these policies are riddled with limitations and exclusions.
“I get that there's a worry here, but I really think you need to be careful to evaluate, you know, what is the real risk here?” said Brasler. “ As with any insurance, you know, you need to evaluate if things go wrong, what am i risking and is buying this insurance plan a good value for me? And when it comes to travel insurance, it's usually not. “
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You’ll pay more for "Cancel For Any Reason" insurance. These policies offer much better coverage, but Brasler said they are expensive and most don’t fully reimburse trip costs. Before buying one, evaluate how much money you’d lose by canceling, and remember, for most trips, you can cancel and get some or all of your money back or rebook later with little or no penalty.
"There are certain types of trips where you might want to buy travel insurance," said Brasler. "If a company of the tour operator or someone says, you know, it's $10,000 and absolutely no refunds, no matter what, you check with them, they won't even rebook you. That may be worth buying a ‘Cancel For Any Reason’ plan, but you need to know in advance that these policies sometimes can be hard to collect from. And also there are still exclusions...a lot of these plans, you don't get the full value back. You only get 50% or 75% of what you paid."
Consumers’ Checkbook does advise consumers to buy insurance to protect against risks that could be financially catastrophic, and says it makes sense for some international travelers to buy medical insurance policies.
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"If you're traveling abroad and your health insurance company doesn't provide coverage for medical travel and doesn't provide coverage for evacuation, if you need to get to someplace that has better medical care, then it's worth buying with those plans, especially if you don't have that type of coverage. And if you're on Medicare, you don't have that coverage,” Brasler said. "And so, if you're traveling a part of the world that doesn't have very good health care facilities and you have a problem and you need to get evacuated, that can cost lots of money. It could cost $100,000.00, $200,000.00. Well, that's the kind of risk that you should buy insurance against, because that would be a financially catastrophic risk for most families."
If you are thinking about buying travel insurance, read through all of the policy exclusions, so you know exactly what is covered. In some cases, that’s dozens of pages of details. And many plans require that you cancel more than 48 hours before your scheduled departure, so if you truly have a last minute emergency, the insurer won’t pay up.
Consumers’ Checkbook has more information on travel insurance policies here: https://www.checkbook.org/nbcBoston/travel-insurance
