Trip Insurance
 

I'm planning a trip to Bhutan and Nepal in the fall. The trip is pretty expensive (compared to others I've done) and I want insurance in case I have to cancel or change for any reason.

Who can advise me on a good company to use?

This site does a comparison of various insurnace options

http://www.squaremouth.com/
it's been written up in quite a few publications which are linked on their website.

A lot of people recommend insuremytrip.com for comparisons. Make sure your policy includes medical (if you don't have cover abroad) and medical evacuation and repatriation. There's a discussion of medevac insurance on the Asia board right now.

I concur with insuremytrip.com. It's a great site to compare multiple policies!

Also, be forewarned that you will be a significant premium to obtain the "cancel for any reason" benefit and often you will only get 50-75% of amount back.

Also, you need to purchase insurance quickly after paying for your trip in order to get the pre-existing conditions waiver.

If you study "cancel for any reason" policies, the amount you're ultimately reimbursed, provided you are within all requirements and restrictions, is about equal to the premium.

Otherwise, cancellations and/or changes are covered only for "covered reasons" and you must understand the terms and conditions, and, especially, the exclusions and requirements.

It's critical to study the actual policy/certificate and not rely on any overview or "examples". Weather, for example, is often excluded as a covered reason if your flight is cancelled, unless the entire airport is closed for a certain number of hours.

One kind of insurance that I would have to recommend would be backing up any travel documents. It's something I've been doing for the last couple of months and it's proven quite effective so far. All you do is go to accessmyid.com and they will take the load off your mind in case you come into any trouble re: passports or medical documents being lost, stolen or copied.
It's a kind of insurance I like to have. As for insuremytrip.com I've had no problems with them in the past, but you have to study all "cancel" policies like djkbooks said. That's where these guys really make there money.

We used Cambell Irvine in the UK to insure our trip to Tanzania. They were quite a bit cheaper -- offered more coverage with fewer exclusions than any US company I found.

http://www.campbellirvine.com/

I ended up purchasing through Travel Guard. Good price and coverage was what I needed. Hopefully I don't need to use it!