Hello fellow travelers, I need to purchase travel insurance for a 10 day June 2023 trip to Italy, and need to make a decision on insurance this week. I am not sure what exactly we should be covering here - I have economy plane tickets on United that are transferrable for future travel. If one of us should get sick and have to quarantine, I'm hoping we'd be able to use the funds from our cancelled flight to reschedule a later flight home? I am wondering when a travel insurer asks for the cost of your trip, what do you include? Plane fares? Hotel fares? What about things like prepurchased train tickets, or prepaid tours? Do you include all those in the "cost" of your trip, or mainly concentrate on big ticket items like plane fare and hotels? Our hotels are cancellable up until just a few days before the trip, but they are still a considerable amount. So I'm wondering what we should include in the "total cost" that we wish to insure?

Also, medical insurance. We are two travelers ages 57 and 22, and of course we want to cover things like COVID but also the possibility of needing repatriation, God forbid, with a flight home. What travel insurers have you used who have reasonable prices for these things? Recommendations appreciated, especially from those who actually had to make a claim with their company.

You need health care insurance. Hopefully you will not need it but you will be happy to have it if you.
For the rest it depends on whether you can afford to eat the cost of the fares etc.

A lot of travel insurance policies cover transportation (evacuation) to the nearest qualified medical facility, whick would be in whatver Italian city you happen to be in. Repatriation often means "sending your body back home..." should you die... It's not necessarily the same term as medical evacuation, or meaning getting you home

#1 - check if your health insurance policy covers you in Italy. Mine does.
#2 - Also check if your credit card you used to book the travel already covers some of what you are asking about.....

You may wish to cover expenses that you cannot recover. I therefore do not cover airline tickets that can be cancelled and the money used later for other flights or hotels that can be canceled without penalty within a reasonable amount of time.

I would check to see if your medical insurance covers trips abroad.

I recommend calling an insurance company and asking them your questions. Various policies cover different things and the company can find one that will address your needs without giving you coverage for items you don't need. I've used squaremouth.com and insuremytrip.com based on recommendations received here but there are others.

FYI, If you want "cover for any reason" insurance you typically need to purchase that insurance within a few days after making your first payment towards your trip - airline fares, prepaid tours, non-refundable hotel bookings, etc. to get the best price. I'm not sure how that would work if you made a payment for something that doesn't need to be covered by travel insurance.

YOu are going to raise the premium if you include costs for things that are not really lost -- like airline tickets where you can a future credit or any hotel booking you can cancel. I never prepay hotels so would never include that in my costs. Legally, you can to get the quote, but I don't know if you'd really get paid if you made a claim. Why should you, if you get a refund. bus tickets, theater tickets, prepaid tours, etc yes, I include those. I don't include airfare as I have never bought a totally nonrefundable fare, you always get a credit of some kind, at least on regular airlines. Last train trips I booked on SNCF were completely refundable, also.

I mainly get it for the medical insurance which is dirt cheap really, you can tell by looking at the premium difference if you say you want to cover $10,000 versus $1000. The medical coverage is the same, lost baggage, trip delay, etc

I think people who pay for expensive cruises or vacation rentals can have more nonrefundable costs.