Travel Insurance

[kevin_standlee]

Both Lisa and I have separate European trips planned this year. I have two shorter trips to the UK (July and October), and Lisa has a long trip to mainland Europe (which is why she's skipping Westercon and Worldcon). As we've done in the past, we buy travel insurance for these trips, not for many of the things they advertise, but in case of catastrophic medical problems requiring emergency medical repatriation, which can run into a six-figure cost. (Consider the price of buying a bunch of seats on a flight and also paying to have the seats taken out and replaced with a hospital bed.) While the chance of it happening is quite low, the cost is astronomical, so the insurance gives us piece of mind.

With my two shorter trips, it turned out to be cheaper to buy a one year policy (up to 45 days over a 12 month period) than to insure each trip separately. I bought that and moved on to Lisa's policy. Her trip is longer and cost more. I filled out the forms online and put up the credit card. The website announced that there was a problem; however, when I checked my credit card, I found that I'd been charged. So I sent an inquiry to Allianz and decided to wait for a reply.

Today, the charge came off my credit card, so I felt free to try again. This time, I tried using Chrome instead of Firefox and everything worked as it should, so Lisa's trip is now also covered.

Comments

Allianz

[lsanderson]

I've been happy with Allianz with two, count 'em, two COVID trip interruptions. Once me, once my travel buddy.

[cmcmck]

Where are you heading?

[kevin_standlee]

I have two trips for events with Cheryl. The one in October is to attend BristolCon and World Fantasy Con. Kayla is looking forward to that one, and has a dress to attend the World Fantasy Awards banquet that (unlike the Hugo Ceremony dress) that doesn't need to be altered. The mid-July trip is something non-fannish about which I'll write after it happens. The July trip is the reason I had to buy that new suit, for reasons that will be more clear when I get to it. In both cases, I should be able to work remotely from Cheryl's home in Ammanford on some of the days I'm there and preserve my limited PTO. The schedule is set up so I fly out from Reno on Friday afternoon, arriving at LHR on Saturday afternoon, then fly back on a Saturday, giving me Sunday to try and recover.

[kshandra]

I've been using ticket insurance for events as well, since I started chemo in 2023, and it has come in handy several times.

[kevin_standlee]

Lisa suggests that in case of needing the emergency air evacuation, it's probably cheaper to charter a transatlantic-capable biz jet than do the thing with the seats in a scheduled commercial flight. Both would be ferociously expensive, of course. We bought travel insurance for our time at Westercon 74 (much less expensive) because with it being ~200 miles to the nearest major hospital (Las Vegas or Reno), Tonopah advertises air ambulance service on billboards in the town. Seemed like a good bet. I'm glad none of our members had to be evacuated to a hospital or even had to go to the urgent care clinic as far as I heard.