Everyone loves to travel and experience great new places. The thrill of planning your entire itinerary out, making sure that everything is paid for and ready for your arrival, and then simply just going and enjoying it is the ideal way to travel.
However, sometimes a trip doesn’t go according to plan.
Cancellations may come up, flight delays are more common than not, and even medical emergencies may occur, or natural disasters, causing you the possibility of expensive alterations to your trip.
Luckily, travel insurance is a fantastic way to guarantee your financial losses are covered during such unfortunate events.
What Is Travel Insurance?
When you go on a trip, the chances are that a lot of financial planning went into it. For example, let’s say you live in Seattle or Portland and plan to fly to Lake Chelan Wine & Jazz Festival via Pangborn airport in the spring. Besides the cost of tickets, you could potentially lose out on all or a portion of the airfare and your hotel costs if something came up last minute.
Making alterations to the trip and getting reimbursed can be challenging and expensive.
That’s where travel insurance comes in.
Travel insurance is designed to provide financial protection should something unexpected happen during your trip. Travelers purchase travel insurance for many reasons. Some of the most common reasons are to cover trip cancellations, medical emergencies, travel delays, and luggage that could potentially go missing.
As much as we would all like to think that we have all our bases covered before taking a trip, many things can happen that are entirely out of our control.
Say a flight gets delayed halfway through a trip to your destination, and you are stuck overnight. You may need to alter or cancel everything you had set up upon arriving at your destination. In addition, you are now stuck with the financial expense of finding an additional hotel, eating expenses, and transportation, all because of an unforeseen flight delay. Another scenario could be a natural disaster like a fire or heavy snow that makes your trip impossible.
With travel insurance, you get reimbursed for these additional expenses or your cancellation fees. This can take the stress and worry out of your planning for the “what if’s.”
Types Of Travel Insurance
There are three types of travel insurance policies: single trip, annual, and group.
Single Trip Travel Insurance Policies
A single trip insurance policy covers one trip. From the moment you depart from your residence to the moment you return to your home from the airport, a single trip policy will cover the entire duration of that single trip. One of the significant benefits of a single trip policy is covering up to 10 travelers per trip.
If you’re concerned about having to cancel the entire trip altogether, you should consider a single trip policy with trip cancellation. This policy combination is perhaps the most commonly used by travelers taking a trip.
One of the major benefits of a trip cancellation policy is that it may completely cover financial losses. This stands true for trip payments, medical emergencies, travel delays, and missing luggage.
While purchasing a cancellation policy, the price will vary depending on the age of a traveler, how long the trip will be, and the entire cost of a trip. So be sure to keep that in mind when considering this policy.
Annual Travel Insurance Policies
An annual travel policy is used by travelers who take multiple trips throughout a single year. An excellent example of this type of traveler would be a business person taking numerous trips a year for their job. At Mountain View Lodge, regular business travelers who stay with us from around the Pacific Northwest opt for annual insurance plans.
With regular traveling and strict schedules, things may not go as smoothly as planned, so annual travel insurance can benefit.
However, the downside to an annual travel policy is that it covers a limited amount and length of trips you can take per year.
The major difference between an annual policy and a single trip policy is that a yearly policy does provide medical coverage should such something happen on your trip. However, it doesn’t offer Trip Cancellation coverage as a single policy either.
Group Travel Insurance Policies
While a single trip policy can cover up to 10 travelers, group travel insurance allows parties of 10 or more travelers to purchase one policy for their trip. In addition, group policies offer benefits similar to single trip policies, including covering trip cancellations should something unexpected happen, medical emergencies, travel delays, and missing luggage.
A large group of people traveling together may find that the group travel policy is much more convenient and affordable for the entire group than any other policy.
One of the benefits of purchasing a group travel policy plan is that the price is not directly affected based on a traveler’s age. This is a significant money-saving feature of the group travel policy since most other policies do take age into account.
Is Travel Insurance Right For You?
Not all travelers require a travel insurance policy. Some trips are straightforward and don’t require travel insurance. For example, if you’re simply flying a short distance to visit family, travel insurance may not be necessary.
However, you should strongly consider insurance if you’re flying across state lines or internationally, have a lot of luggage, have many things on your schedule, traveling during potential weather events, or have paid for ticketed experiences and events. Remember, COVID-19 throws a curveball in the equation as well. Services like airlines and hotels can modify their availability based on changing guidelines. Therefore, we recommend travel insurance for most trips, even when coming to Lake Chelan. And, be sure to read all the fine details of the coverage you’re considering. If you’d like to talk to someone about your trip coverage coming up with Mountain View Lodge, feel free to reach out to us — we’d be happy to help.