Usually Whoever you book your trip through offers trip and medical insurance. A lot of insurance companies offer it also. I know the company we have our house insured through offers it.
I may regret not buying in the future, however we are way ahead of the game right now for having never paid for the coverage. We are Premier members and could always use the AI fees at a future time, and would only be out airfare penalities. We usually fly SW within the states and there is no penalty for changing or cancelling with SW.
We get our through work, so no need to buy but we highly reccomend it. To stress this point a friend of ours got quite ill in Cuba (almost died) and was airlifted home and all the medical bills cost roughly about 200k+. If he had not had insurace he would have been on hook for the entire thing.
We always buy it when we leave the country. We especially like the provision for evacuation coverage and medical expenses. We also get the "cancel for work reasons" and had to use it once. We were fully refunded quickly and easily!
I have a travel credit card that covers all my trip & cancellation issues. I use it to book all my travel and save paying travel insurance for each trip. Works out much cheaper and as far as I know, offers much better insurance. Just the flight delay and lost luggage portion alone tops anything I've seen. The 3 mins before my flight is 240 mins late, which seems to be happening more and more, I'm lined up at the bar to start my $100/person free tab. Missed connection? They'll book me on another airline to try and get me to my destination on time. Short of that, they'll pony up a hotel & upgrade, an extremely small meal, a moderately obscene bar tab & a breakfast of champions. Delayed luggage - I now look forward to delayed luggage. It means new stuff and I don't have to pull out the hotel iron the next morning. Lost or Stolen luggage - not limited to the $120 airline max.
We have bought travel insurance occasionally due to sick family members and changing work schedules. Came in handy once. The Insurance also covered medical & medi-vac flights. I'm not real sure how my personal insurance pays out when outside of the USA. I need to KNOW.. cause,, u never know.. ( u know?) :huh:
We always get it...last Oct we were at TTR when Hurricane Rina came (ended up being a tropical storm) but we were stuck at TTR an extra 3 days which I paid out of pocket, made a claim when we returned and a week later I get reimbursed for the room stay and everything else that I had receipts for...if I didnt have insurance that would have been my loss
We made our first trip to TTR in Jan. of 2011. The reservations were made in Oct 2010. Let me remind you that Jan. 2011 we experienced some serious snow storms closing down several airports for days. We had purchased the trip insurance and it was well worth it in the end. Our flight from WV to NC was downed for weather. We made the drive to NC and made the trip anyway! We did get reimbursed for the flights that were downed and for the flight we missed back home due to driving. The reimbursement took about 45 days but we did get our money back.
