Travel insurance often feels like an unnecessary and scammy add-on to a trip and is often an afterthought. We often think, “It’s vacation! What could go wrong? I’ll never get injured or my bag will never be delayed by my airline!” Honestly, before leaving my corporate job, which provided me with health insurance, I had never looked into alternative insurance when traveling through different countries.
Why You May Need Travel Insurance
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 Kevin and I travel full-time, we have travel medical insurance to cover us 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 travel insurance companies, check on the services that your credit card provides. Some 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.
Now, many of these credit cards have steep annual fees and it is truly up to you to evaluate those fees against the benefits that come with the card. These are some websites we use to evaluate different credit cards (Nerd Wallet, the Points Guy, AP News) We are not financial advisors and can only provide you with the resources that you can use to evaluate your options. Disclaimer: 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. We can go through more about travel and points and credit cards another day.
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 truly need 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 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 nomad 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.
Currently, we provide all information on this website for free. The links in this article are purely for your information and usage. We do not make any money off of you clicking those links!
Why SafetyWing Is Not All That is Advertised
One insurance company that we saw 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 and we ended up purchasing their services. We did not fully understand the insurance world at the time and copped up the negative reviewers to be complainers who did not know how to properly file claims.
Before leaving for our world travels, we purchased SafetyWing’s insurance and 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 and it took them 3 days to determine that their system had a bug that did not notify people that their policy was at risk of not being renewed. After 12 hours of following up with them and getting no further information, we decided it would be best to spend our time finding a more reliable travel insurance provider.
A better 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.
While this plan is the best for us at the moment, it is important to do your 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.
