Insure to value needs to be defined

In order to qualify for a waiver of pre-existing medical conditions travel insurance companies generally require a traveler to insure their trip cost to “the full non-refundable cost of Your Trip”.  However, there appears to be a lack of an objective definition of what this means.

On the surface it appears to mean that a traveler only has to insure their trip cost to the total amount of non-refundable money that they paid to go on the trip.  In reality many of the travel insurance companies ignore this obvious definition and apply a stricter definition that favors the insurance company instead by requiring the traveler to insure for the full, pre-paid, cost of the trip which includes money that is fully refundable.  At the heart of the issue is whether or not a traveler qualifies for the waiver of pre-existing medical conditions and in many cases whether or not a claim will be honored.

Normally when an ambiguity exists in a travel insurance contract the benefit of the doubt should go to the traveler because they are the weaker party to the contract.  However, time and again, you can read where an insurance company denied a claim because the client didn’t insure to the full, pre-paid trip cost.  And in some cases the insured value and the actual value were only a few, immaterial, dollars different.  Changing this to a clear definition that is easy to understand will be in the best interests of our consumers.

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