If you are traveling outside your home country, you might be wondering if you should be purchasing Travel Insurance for your trip. The answer is yes- but be selective and get informed.
The most common reasons people seek travel insurance is to protect themselves from losses incurred from trip interruptions/cancellations, lost baggage, illness and accidents.
Just as a heads up, most insurances only cover trip cancellations and interruptions if the trip was set off course due to adverse weather conditions, labor strikes and certain technical difficulties. If you then meet the criteria, you must get a note from the airline attesting to these circumstances which caused interruption to your trip. Taking off late and thus causing you to miss your connecting flight does not count, unfortunately. However, with labor strikes and strange weather appearing in the news affecting air traffic, albeit rarely, it is worth the investment to protect your plane ticket investment with a small insurance policy. This is an example of the nuances in the policies you should investigate before deciding to purchase or when determining the best travel insurance policy for you.
Here are a couple comprehensive resources you should consult when considering a quote on travel insurance:
Insure My Trip: A sort of "Kayak" of what would be a Travel Insurance search engine. http://www.insuremytrip.com/
Travelex: I selected Travelex since they operate stands (even if primarily for currency exchange) within several major International Airports. http://www.travelexinsurance.com/
CSA Travel Protection: They list over 4000 ratings with an average of nearly 5 stars. This seemed to offer the most competitively priced policy for trip interruption and baggage insurance. http://www.csatravelprotection.com/
Travel Insurance is very affordable and worth it! Just get the policies relevant to you and realistic to the risk it is claiming to protect. Don't forget to call the customer service lines of these insurance providers to get the most accurate information between the lines in their F.A.Q. website pages. Furthermore, if you are traveling to Italy you should definitely consider certain insurances. For example, the major Italian airline Alitalia made headlines for nearly filing for bankruptcy protection, not to mention labor strikes being a relatively common practice.
Better safe than sorry- travel with insurance!
