What is Travel Insurance? Best travel insurance in Cyprus in 2024
What is travel insurance?
These include:
- What is travel insurance suited for?
- Types of travel insurance
- What does travel insurance cover?
- How much does travel insurance cost?
- How to calculate trip cost for travel insurance?
- What to consider before buying travel insurance?
Types of Travel Insurance
Here are the various types of travel insurance:
One-Trip Insurance Policy
As its name implies, the one-trip insurance policy will offer coverage for a single journey. It is suitable for people who travel once in a while, such as during summer vacations.
Multi-Trip Travel Insurance Policy
These policies make sense for frequent travelers, such as businesspersons who are always on the road (or at an airport). Based on your needs, you can purchase a policy that covers various trips to multiple destinations. Or you can opt for a plan that covers multiple trips to a single destination.
Group Travel Insurance Policy
A group policy requires 7 or more people. Its cost is based on the age of every member of the group, making it more cost-effective for young, individual travelers. Most travel insurance providers offer group travel insurance policies for international tours.
What does Travel Insurance Cover?
Now that you know what travel insurance is, let’s discuss what it covers:
- Injury or sickness
Most travel insurance plans will cover your medical expenses if you encounter a medical emergency during the journey. This distinguishes travel insurance from health insurance, which doesn’t usually offer coverage on international trips.
- Lost, damaged or stolen luggage
Don’t worry if you cannot locate your baggage at your destination, as long as you purchased a travel insurance policy beforehand. These policies require the insurer to be reimbursed for their loss, up to a specific amount. OneTrip Premier of Allianze, for instance, covers up to $2,000 of baggage losses.
- Trip cancellation coverage
Most travel insurance policies reimburse their customers for prepaid, non-refundable trip deposits. To qualify, the cancellation reason should be covered by your policy. This is one of multiple reasons why you should read the fine print while purchasing travel insurance.
- Trip delay coverage
Should your trip faces a delay due to reasons covered by the policy, the insurance provider might be required to provide reimbursement. Covered reasons usually include airline maintenance, poor weather conditions, or civil unrest.
- Trip interruption coverage
Provided a family emergency back home forces you to return home early or an injury during the journey requires you to cut short your trip, your travel insurance policy might reimburse non-refundable expenses. Some policies also offer a one-way economy trip back home.
- Medical expenses
While most health insurance plans fail to cover medical expenses or emergencies incurred during an international journey. A travel insurance policy covers both. Some policies go so far as to cover emergency medical evacuation. Needless to say that the latter tend to be super-expensive.
How much does Travel Insurance Cost?
According to Forbes, the average cost of travel insurance is 5% to 6% of the entire trip cost.
The exact cost of a policy depends on your trip cost and age.
Someone in their 30s might purchase a policy at 5% of the entire trip cost.
However, for another person in their 60s, the cost of travel insurance might balloon to as much as 12% of the trip cost.
How to Calculate the Trip Cost for Travel Insurance?
All travel insurance plans base the price of the policy on the trip cost, as well as other factors such as your age, medical conditions you want covered, trip length, and more.
It is thus crucial to calculate your trip cost accurately.
Add all these expenses to calculate your trip cost:
- Any non-refundable costs you have already paid, such as the fare of the airline, cruise, train, etc.
- Costs of pre-arranged road transportation, such as to/from the airport, hotel, cruise, etc.
- Non-refundable fees paid before traveling, such as for retreats, guided tours, conventions, seminars, etc.
- Cancelation penalties in case you don’t make it to the destination in time, such as a deposit for a one-bedroom apartment (don’t forget to include a copy of the rental agreement with an explicit clause indicating cancellation fees).
What to Consider Before Buying Travel Insurance?
Here are a few things you might want to consider when buying travel insurance:
1)Coverage
The policy should cover the most common situations that could arise during your trip. These include COVID 19, loss of baggage, medical emergencies, stolen goods, etc.
2)Add-ons
Most policies don’t cover expensive items such as jewelry, antiques, laptops, etc. If you’re planning on carrying such things on you, it’s recommended to have them included as add-on covers.
3)Medical history
If you have a pre-existing medical condition or if you smoke or consume alcohol regularly, the premium will be higher for you than for anyone who is well clear of these problems.
4)Reputation of the insurance provider
Ask your friends or visit online forums to know more about the insurance provider. You can also turn to aggregator sites if you’re looking for recommendations.
Conclusion
In this article we explained you what is travel insurance.
Purchasing travel insurance doesn’t feature high on the list of things people usually do while planning for their trip.
However, as anyone who has ever set foot out of their home might tell you, it is always better to be safe than sorry.
Amir Bashir,