A few questions about travel insurance answered

Just thought I’d take a few moments here to go over what some of the more commonly asked questions about filling the insurance quote forms on our site. Having been in the travel insurance industry for more than 14 years, you tend to take for granted the knowledge you get and sometimes forget that to those just coming in, some of the questions can be somewhat confusing to new comers.

So, this is for the new people coming to our site or those who are returning to us. Always remember that we thank you for choosing QuoteWright.com for your travel insurance needs.

Looking to Insure?

Trip, Cruise and Flight Cancellation vs. Comprehensive Travel Coverage

This is where you choose what kind of travel insurance that you are looking for. We have six categories to choose from. The most popular kind of travel insurance that people are looking for is Trip, Cruise or Flight Cancellation policies, and that happens to be the first selection that you can make on our menu.

Next up, we have the Comprehensive Travel Coverage. One important thing to know is that both of these selections are bringing you to the exact same policies! Within the travel insurance industry, they are known as Package Policies. Why do we have it this way? We found out that people coming to our site have different perceptions of what those policies are called. Those people that refer to them as trip cancellation policies would not know that the comprehensive policies were the ones they were looking for if only comprehensive policies were listed and vice versa for those looking for comprehensive polices and only seeing the trip, cruise and flight cancellation policies listed. We decided to list both on the menu for those two types.

*All Package Policies offer coverage for trip cancellation/ interruption, medical, emergency medical evacuation, baggage, baggage delay, and travel delay.

Medical Expenses

The next choice that you can make is the selection Medical Expenses. This one seems pretty self explanatory on the surface, but looking deeper, we see that like all insurance, it can get confusing pretty quickly for the uninitiated. One thing to know about all of the medical plans that we carry on our site is that each and every one of them will cover you for not only medical, but also emergency medical evacuation as well. I’ll get to why this may be important to you a little further on in this article.

There are two kinds of medical policies that you can get. Medical Only plans and Package plans (yup, the ones that I mentioned earlier). Bear with me and I will explain the difference between the two.

Medical Only plans can be purchased by the following two groups: those who are U.S. citizens and those who are citizens of any other country. It would be much simpler to say that they would cover anyone, but since this is insurance, there are differences between the two. U.S. citizens can only purchase the Medical Only plans as long as they are traveling outside their home country. Non-U.S. citizens can only purchase the Medical Only plans as long as they are not traveling within the country of their citizenship. This is important to remember. Let’s say that you are a U.S. citizen and the trip you are going on is within the United States. The Medical Only plans will not cover you. It does not mean that there aren’t any options for you, so don’t worry too much.

If you are a U.S. citizen and you are traveling within the United States, the plans that you should be looking at are the Package Policies. Now I stated earlier that the package policies offer coverage for trip cancellation/ interruption, medical, emergency medical evacuation, baggage, baggage delay and travel delay. What I didn’t tell you is that you can choose not to insure yourself for trip cancellation/ interruption and still get the rest of the benefits that the policies have to offer. You simply enter 0 in the trip cost field to do so. Now please remember that when you do this, you will not have any coverage for either trip cancellation or trip interruption! You will have the medical, medical evacuation and other coverage that I stated earlier. Keep in mind to that coverage that you feel you do not need are not removable from the policies. They are what they are.

Medical Evacuation/ Repatriation

This category is for Emergency Medical Evacuation only. There’s no other coverage offered with those plans. To define it in a nutshell, emergency medical evacuation/ repatriation is designed for when you have an injury or an illness that is as such where the local medical facility is unable to deal with your medical condition, it evacuates you to the closest medical facility that can take proper care of you until you are stabilized. After stabilization, it pays to evacuate you back to your home country.

This coverage is useful to people traveling into countries where the medical facilities aren’t so great and they don’t want to get treated there.

Flight Accident

Flight Accident coverage is one of the more simple to understand policies that are available. These hearken back to the days when it was commonly called flight insurance (not to be confused with insuring the cost of the air fare). It provides coverage, if you suffer an accident on a licensed airline that results in your death or dismemberment, it will pay out the benefit amount to who-ever you choose as your beneficiary.

Fulfill Visa Insurance Requirement

This is a very specific kind of travel medical insurance. It is only required by non U.S. citizens traveling into Schengen countries. What is a Schengen Visa? To give a very brief definition, you have to look back into history concerning the difficulties involved in traveling throughout Europe. Each country it seemed had it’s own Visa and Passport requirements and had border check points that you had to go through before entering another country. The short of it was that several years ago, a bunch of those European countries got together and came up with the Agreement and much akin to the Euro (currency) to standardize money across the EU, the Schengen Agreement set about to standardize the requirements for travel across Europe. The Schengen countries now require that citizens from certain countries (not including the USA) have a medical policy that covers at least 30,000 Euros (about $37,000) for medical without a deductible and that it includes emergency medical evacuation/ repatriation.

As I stated above, you only need to look at the Schengen Visa quotes if you are a non U.S. citizen traveling over to Europe and the embassy or consulate of the country you are traveling to requires it.

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