Have you got this covered? Most people don’t.
More than six out of 10 Americans traveled last year without any kind of insurance, per a survey from Upgraded Points. It’s an unsexy risk that makes us outliers in the global scene. For example, 86% of Australians bought coverage for their big trips.
And sure, these days, most fancy credit cards build in minimal travel insurance as part of their benefits, but there’s also a raft of niche products that are equally affordable and reassuring (just read the fine print, of course).
Take breakup insurance. It’s the brainchild of Annie Sloan of the Host Co., a company that offers back-end services to apartment rentals.
“People are finally being offered insurance for the things they actually care about,” she said of her partnership with travel insurance company Faye. “It’s about removing the abstraction of what insurance is for.”
It’s a canny repackaging of so-called CFAR, or Cancel for Any Reason insurance, that’s long been a staple in the biz. If you opt into Sloan’s product on a booking via her platform — expect to pay around $100 for $1,000 of coverage — you can nix a trip up to 24 hours before you’re due to travel if you simply get a case of the icks.
You can’t change the weather, but you can insure against it now.
Startups like Poncho, Sensible Weather and WeatherPromise offer affordable policies that can pay out if your sunny day on the links is wrecked by rain. JetBlue struck a corporate tie-up with WeatherPromise bundling it as an option for its vacation packages.
And this spring, its Great Weather Guarantee for Jamaica offered a $500 payout this spring if the rain on a given trip exceeded a pre-determined level for that vacation. It helped spike interest, per JetBlue, which saw bookings increase 18% year over year, even with reduced air capacity to the destination. Travel Inconvenience insurance from World Nomads works much the same way: Worried about that predicted El Niño winter leaving the slopes snow-free? You can opt into protection against that weather disruption under this plan.
If more than the occasional downpour is weighing on your mind, how about buying a policy from Hotspot Cover? It’s primed for conflict zones or edgy environments where thrills and dangers are served up in equal doses.
The 7-year-old firm, which works with Lloyd’s of London, is a go-to for aid workers and the like, but is also well placed for anyone planning a safari in Angola, perhaps, or even opting for Emirates for any long-haul trips amid the current crisis climes. The Gulf Transit Cover program was fast-launched as a backstop if that route proved too dangerous to take. Set aside a couple hundred bucks for a family if you need Medjet in your back pocket for that week away: It’s the firm that specializes in high-end extraction in medical emergencies — and there’s no exclusions for adventure travel or even pre-existing conditions, as long as you’re under 75.
What if you’re lucky enough to be roaming the world near full-time, hopscotching from country to country on one of the ever-expanding digital nomad visas (some of the latest to roll out the virtual red carpet: Sri Lanka, Bulgaria and Italy)?
San Francisco-based SafetyWing’s Nomad Insurance is expressly tailored for you. Adults pay from just $443 per month for comprehensive medical (including dental and vision) plus job loss and long-term care backstops. The only downside: It isn’t available for the rest of us.
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