Long term travel insurance or regular travel insurance often feels like an unnecessary add-on to a trip and many times is an afterthought. We think, “It’s vacation! What could go wrong? I’ll never get injured or my bag will never be delayed by my airline!” However, even if you have health insurance, it is still important to purchase additional travel insurance when traveling through different countries just in case something unexpected occurs.
Why You May Need Long Term Travel Insurance or A Regular One
If you have reserved an expensive, non-refundable trip (such as a cruise or a group trip), it may be advisable, or even required, to get insurance to protect your trip and your money if anything comes up. In addition, if you get seriously sick or injured, you may want emergency travel medical insurance to cover the costs that could be incurred.
Because Blueprint Travelers travel full-time, we have long term travel insurance to cover us medically as we travel around the world. As a result, we evaluate our insurance needs particularly for long-term travel. Some insurances can give you plans for long-term travel, coverage for multiple trips within a period, or just plans for a set trip with pre-determined dates.
The Different Kinds of Travel Insurance
STOP! Don’t panic and check out your credit card!
Before you go down a rabbit hole of looking into different long term travel insurance companies, check on the services that your credit card provides. Some U.S. travel credit cards provide insurance coverage for things like lost bags on airlines or car rental damage. To use this coverage, you must book your trip with that credit card and comply with any of the terms of use that is requires.
Now, many of these credit cards have various fees and benefits so it is up to you to evaluate which ones will be the right fit for your lifestyle. These are some websites we use to evaluate different credit cards (Nerd Wallet, the Points Guy, AP News) because they do a good job keeping up with the ever changing landscape and summarizing the benefits. Nerd Wallet is sponsored by different credit card companies and the Points Guy gets compensation when you click on the products it displays so make sure to research independently beyond these websites to see what is best for you.
Credit cards can include lost luggage, trip delay or cancellation, or rental car collision coverage. That being said, there are some things to consider that are not covered by credit cards, including medical coverage or the tech gear that you are taking with you. You need to evaluate if you need long term travel insurance based on the location you are going to and the activities you are doing. (If you are going to an area where you have a higher chance of getting sick, you may want to look into a travel insurance policy beyond your credit card.)
Different Things to Look for in a Travel Insurance Policy
- Travel medical plan – medical expenses for when you’re sick or have an emergency medical issue while on a trip that is not covered by your current health insurance
- Emergency evacuation and repatriation – transportation to the nearest hospital or home, whichever is medically appropriate. (This is particularly important if you are looking to go somewhere more remote, far away from a full hospital.)
- Trip cancellation, interruption, and delay – you’ll have to read the fine print of any policy to see exactly what they cover concerning cancellation, interruption, or delay.
- “Cancel for any reason” coverage – you often have to purchase this immediately after purchasing your trip, but it will allow you to cancel your trip for any reason and obtain a refund for that trip. This is often expensive, but not as expensive as your non-refundable trip, especially if you are booking a luxury experience.
- Baggage and personal belongings – this covers your luggage or any other belongings you are bringing. You will want to read the fine print of this policy to see where they stop covering your belongings and the limit they set
- Car rental collision insurance – this covers any accident you have with a rental car
How Choosing a Travel Medical Insurance Works
Some websites allow you to compare different travel insurances, like a marketplace. You will need to input your travel dates, your age, the amount the trip cost you, and your trip destination. You can filter based on the requirements you have for the insurance, the deductible, minimums, maximum, etc. This website, InsureMyTrip.com, contains a lot of different insurance companies and allows you to compare and select the aspects of insurance that are important to you.
From this marketplace, go directly to the insurance provider’s website to get the most detailed information about the policy. You also may be able to adjust the settings of the policy, including the deductible and maximum, changing the cost of the insurance. You can also learn a little more about the company issuing the policy.
This is great for insurance for a singular trip. Now, if you are looking for long term travel insurance (like what we needed to travel full-time), you will need to look for something different and this will often lead you to different blogs.
Be Wary of What Bloggers Promote!
Bloggers make money off of something called affiliate links. The links to different products on their websites provide them a kickback when you purchase through that link. As a result, there may be an inherent bias to what they promote on their website, based on the companies that allow for affiliate links or have kick-back programs. Many of the most advertised companies likely have the most lucrative affiliate programs and may not even be used by the people promoting it.
Why SafetyWing Is Not All That is Advertised
One insurance company that you may see over and over on different bloggers’ platforms is SafetyWing. They have a few different plans that seem suitable for anyone ranging from one-time trips to digital nomads. The company markets itself as insurance for digital nomads and they even sponsor different talks by digital nomads. Their marketing clearly worked because we ended up purchasing their services as it seemed to be a trusted insurance company by many reputable bloggers. We did not fully understand the insurance world at the time and even though we saw a large quantity of very negative reviewers disregarded the clear warnings that this may not be a great company for our insurance needs.
During our first year with SafetyWing’s insurance, after 6 months they canceled our insurance without giving us advance notice. We only found out because we checked our email with an update from SafetyWing saying we no longer had a policy with them. We immediately reached out for support but their customer service team did not know what was going on. They put in a support ticket for IT help but did not have any way to escalate the issue. To make matters worse, they didn’t offer any way to talk to someone other than a chat bot. After 12 hours of following up with them over chat and getting no further information, we decided it would be best to spend our time finding a more reliable long term travel insurance provider. 3 days later they did let us know that their system had a bug that caused for the drop in coverage without any explanation. This could have been catastrophic if we had not noticed the cancelled notification and something serious would have happened while without coverage.
A better Long Term Travel insurance company through independent research
Through this whole process, we learned that SafetyWing is simply a broker for a different insurance company, WorldTrips. We found out that we could purchase a similar (even better!) policy directly with that insurance company, eliminating the unnecessary paperwork and red tape of filing claims through a broker (which was one of the biggest complaints by other customers!) We were also able to purchase a plan for a custom length of time, guaranteeing the insurance for the duration of our time in South America. And finally, the customer service was truly phenomenal for helping us identify them as the best alternative and providing us with a policy that kicked in the next day. WorldTrips has different plans that can support a wide variety of travel insurance needs and if you ever have any concerns there will be actual people to help you through those issues.
While this plan is the best for us at the moment, it is important to do your own research about the right plan for you. What works for a digital nomad may not be the right thing for a luxury vacationer. We know people who are going on a luxury vacation who opted for World Nomads to cover their trip because it fits their budget and protection requirements.
It may seem time-consuming to evaluate multiple insurance companies, so for an individual trip, using a marketplace may be the best way to compare. However, if you are looking to travel for longer periods, it is worth the time and energy to dive deeper into learning about nomad insurance companies.
