Thoughts on travel insurance vs full price airline tickets. US east coast to Italy and return.

Consult insuremytrip.com or squaremouth.com to see which plan best suits your needs.

We buy trip insurance when we travel - but mainly for the medical coverage. I book hotels or apartments that can be cancelled, also rental cars. I don't normally spend extra for refundable airline tickets. I don't insure for the total nonrefundable amount of any trip. I figure I can afford to lose on some of my nonrefundable expenses, but if I get sick or have an accident, the medical costs could be huge.

If you go to insuremytrip.com or squaremounth.com (and others I am sure). you can buy the minimal coverage you want, and the medical/evacuation/dental coverage remains the same as it does for a higher coverage/cost policy.

I agree with ScDreamer. But for me, the most important is evacuation insurance. If something really, really bad happens, I want to be flown back to a hospital in my home city.
For this reason, I've bought a policy from medjetssist.com. several times; its an annual policy and they will (or at least they claim that they will) fly you back home in a medical emergency (if you can wait that long!!).


https://medjetassist.com


But most of my travel now is within Europe. If I am going to a more "exotic" destination, like on safari in Africa, I'd buy a more comprehensive policy. It's all pretty confusing to me, however!!

I did get a payout that covered my costs when I had to cancel a trip to ("exotic" category) Patagonia a couple of years go.

My air tickets are, if not fully refundable, at least cancellable for a small fee. And almost all of my hotels are cancellable 24 hours before arrival (except the one I'm staying in now!!). Although I;m finding that more hotels are taking a deposit with booking that might not be cancellable. I'd try to avoid those.

Thank you. I will check out the website. Getting home quickly with a medical problem is very important.

Thank you. Will check them out.

Thank you. Will study up this morning!

We have twice had to use our travel insurance. Once was with a policy we had from Allianz. It was a lifesaver as unfortunately, my wife got hospitalized, but this policy paid the entire bill. This was in Thailand. I must say they were very supportive and made this claims process in an expeditious manner.

The other time was with American Express. We got delayed returning to the US from Madrid due to super storm Sandy. I had to buy tickets to come back home because we couldn’t wait five days like United wanted us to. However, American Express paid the entire bill for those tickets.

We now go with travel guard mostly. In any case good luck with your selection and it’s a great idea to have travel insurance especially for as noted, emergency, evacuation, and hospitalizations.

We always would buy individual trip policies through insuremytrip.com. Recently we bought an annual medical/evacuation policy through GeoBlue and rely on our Chase sapphire credit card for trip/cancellation insurance.

A couple of days after the OP I took a look at insuremytrip. Saw GeoBlue and International SOS both of which I had used before. I got the GeoBlue one.

I noticed that preexisting conditions were covered for "sudden recurrence". If you have a preexisting condition, then look for that and learn about how it might apply to you.