NEVER Buy Cruise Travel Insurance Until You Watch This (For 60+)

0:00 In this video, I'm going to show you how to buy cruise insurance if you're over 60. And 71% of cruise travelers do buy insurance, but most of them do it wrong. And I'll show you all the big mistakes that they make so that you can avoid them. If it's your first time seeing me, I am a licensed insurance agent since 2005. I started the first travel insurance review and blog website way back then as well, and I've helped over 100,000 travelers find the best plan for their trip. First of all, before anything else, yes, you do need travel insurance. I'm going to show you why in just a second. There's a reason that to say 71% of cruise travelers buy insurance. Let me show you. First of all, think about it. You're in the middle of the ocean on a ship. Think about medical emergencies. Not just things like getting maybe food poisoning or just a small little cut or something like that. They have medical services on

0:46 the ship for that. But think about serious stuff that happens all the time like a stroke, like heart attacks, like big serious things where you want to have a hospital nearby. You want to get and go and get good medical care at a proper hospital. These cruises are often going to foreign waters where you would also have foreign hospitals. Some can be great, some can be a nightmare. It really depends. So, you want to be able to get good care at a good hospital. Another aspect of cruises is the fact that you have all of your travel expenses all in one big basket, let's call it. So, it's kind of like taking your hotel and your transportation and your meals, and it puts it all together into one big lump sum. And that lump sum can be lost if you need to cancel your trip. Cruises also have a ton of I would call them moving parts. So oftentimes you'll take a flight to get to your port

1:31 that you're departing from. You'll stay in a hotel there. You'll get on the ship and you'll take the trip from there. Maybe excursions and then you'll get back and maybe stay another night in a hotel and then a flight back home. So it's a lot of different parts again that can go wrong that can get you messed up. So, for example, a delay that gets you to that port city for departure could make you miss the boat and then you have to catch up to the boat somewhere and that could be very costly. Another big part is weather and hurricanes, things like that. So, a hurricane or weather could delay you getting out of your airport to get to the ship, so you miss it. It could happen during the trip and they'll route around them, but it could also cause a lot of issues there. So, these ships usually go to hurricane prone areas and during the seasons that those things happen. Again, like I said, 71% by insurance. I'm not sure what the other 29% are thinking, but most people

2:17 buy insurance. Now, the problem is most of them buy it from the wrong place. I'm going to talk about that in a minute. So, before we even start looking at plans, it's important to know your risks. There are a lot of different plans and they all have different coverage at different prices. So, there are a lot of variables that we're looking at. So, knowing exactly what you're looking to cover is going to help you pick the right plan. So, for example, with cruises, a big part of it, as we just talked about, is health and safety. you're out at sea with only foreign ports nearby. If something happens out at sea, one of those serious things that we talked about, you want the best care at the best hospital. You don't want to have to rely on either the care on board the ship or getting into a port and having a medical facility that really doesn't give you a lot of confidence in the type of care that you're getting. Another big part is transportation. So, if you need to get

3:03 off the ship to a hospital, the ship's not going to go to port just for you. They need to evacuate people off those ships. $50,000, $100,000. These are expensive flights that get you there. Another part of the transportation is if you get to port, you find that good hospital, but then you need to be taken back home. That's another risk. The fact that you're stuck in a foreign country, you need a medical flight. Again, $50,000, $100,000 easily for those sorts of things. Now, another big aspect of this is losing that money on the trip if you need to cancel. The most common reason that I have right here is you, a travel companion, or a family member getting sick. by far the most common reason that trips get cancelled. And after that, it's things like weather and hurricanes, terrorism. There are many reasons, we're going to go over that in a minute. There are many reasons though

3:49 for a trip to be canceled that gives you coverage. And as you probably know, the refund that's offered by the cruise line is famously bad. They really don't give you anything if you cancel the trip 30, 60, or even 90 days before the trip. So, that leaves a lot of room for something to go wrong, someone to get sick, a death in the family, one of those covered reasons that we'll talk about. I always like to go over trusting Medicare. Now, in general, the rule is that Medicare does not cover you outside the United States, but as I've made videos on this, there are always comments from people who have a certain type of plan that they believe does provide coverage for them. So, that would include things like Medicare Advantage and Medigap and all the different plans that they offer that could provide some sort of coverage. But, if you really dig into it, it is confusing. They still don't cover

4:35 everything. And in my opinion, it's just not worth the risk. For true peace of mind, getting separate coverage is always a good idea. And if you're just looking at the medical part, it's not that much money to get it. The Medicare stuff is so confusing, I actually made this chart to show people when they ask questions about it. The better options are in the green. At the top is travel insurance in this comparison, but down in the middle, you can see these metagap plans that can provide some coverage, but look at this. There's no evacuation coverage. That's the transportation off the boat or or back home from a foreign country. They'll still have a deductible of $250. A lot of actually most travel insurance plans don't have a deductible, the better ones. And these have a co insurance. So basically, if it does cover something, Medicare would cover

5:21 80% of the costs. You would cover the other 20%. So again, in the end, I would not rely on Medicare for coverage abroad with medical emergencies. So here's your to-do for step one is to gather your trip cost. get an idea of what you're spending on the trip. That's what you would lose if you had to cancel. This can be anything that's prepaid and non-refundable. So, that would include the cost of the cruise, the deposit, all the payments that you've made towards the cruise, including any excursions that you're taking. Also, you can put in the flight to get to the port city, the flight back home, any hotels before and after, anything that's prepaid and non-refundable from the time you leave your home until the time you come back. So, now that we've talked about the risks and you know how much money that you have at risk as far as your trip costs, we're going to talk about comparing plans. You want a choice of

6:06 plans and companies to pick from. Most cruise travelers buy from the wrong place. I mentioned this in the beginning. That wrong place is the cruise line itself. I'm sure you've seen this before. It pops up everywhere you buy travel now. Airlines, cruise lines, for sure, concert tickets, they're always offering the insurance for those tickets or for those costs. The problem is these are stripped down plans designed for the cruise line really to just sell well. You're not getting a choice. You have one thing to choose from. So that's not even a choice at all. The coverage is usually worse. It won't cover the whole trip. It just covers the cruise. So the flights and hotels before and after are not covered by this plan. And notice here you'll see they use the word protection and not insurance. It's because it's not technically an insurance plan. It's

6:52 really just the cruise line giving a waiver to their own cancellation policy. So, what's the solution? It's to use a comparison site. It's a place where you can go and look at all plans from all companies and look at all the prices and have a ton of options. You can use something like covertrip.com, which is my site, but there are many others. These work like Expedia work for flights. You put in your information with Expedia and it gives you all the different airlines and how much they cost. With travel insurance, you put in your information in one place and you get quotes from all the different companies. That way you don't have to visit all the different individual sites and put in your information over and over again. And then we let you compare those plans side by side so you can see the coverage and see all the differences. So using a comparison site, it will save you money. Travel insurance is usually 4 to 8% of the insured trip

7:37 cost. Now that price range is for a travel insurance plan with cancellation coverage. That's something you can leave out of the plan. Most people get it, but it's something you can leave out and that would reduce that cost quite a bit. Having a choice of plans means that you get the best coverage for the best price. You're getting good value for your money. And insurance is regulated by every state. So the price is the same everywhere. If you go to an insurance company website and get a quote there and if you use a comparison site, it's going to be the exact same amount. So let me show you now how this all works. So here we are on covertrip.com. You can go to start my quote and it's going to ask you questions about your trip. If anything's not clear, you can hover over the question mark and it will tell you what information that we're looking for there. So, we'll put in Bahamas, let's say. Click continue. We can select our

8:24 dates. Let's say it's a twoe trip in April. Here, we're asking how many travelers are going on the trip. We'll say two travelers and their ages, 65 and 65. What country do you live in? It's preset to United States, but they can be changed. Travel insurance turns through sites like this. What country do you live in? United States. What state? Enter your state and country of citizenship. Here's the question about trip cancellation coverage. We're going to say yes, but you can select no. You can see the cost goes away there. So, $7,000 and continue. When was the first deposit date? It explains this here, but some

9:09 coverages depend on when you made your first payment. This is important. I'll talk about this a little bit more later, but let's say we just made our first payment towards the trip a couple days ago. And then, do you still have payments? Let's say no, I still owe. You put a deposit in, but you still owe the rest. So, now this is going out to every company, and it's looking at every plan, and it's getting quotes for everything that you are eligible for. Now, I won't go into this right now, but this is the results screen. You can see all the different plans from all the different companies. And this goes down quite a ways. Right at the top here, it says that there are 56 plans. And we have some different tools that we can use to sort plans. And we'll take a look at that in just a minute. So, we've put in our trip information into the comparison site. We have a bunch of plans to choose from, but we want to make sure that we

9:55 get the best plan for our cruise. Let's look at that now. It's recommended to have at least $100,000 of emergency medical coverage for your trip. Another aspect of this coverage is primary versus secondary medical coverage. Primary is always better because they'll pay from dollar one with no questions asked. When you see primary coverage, that's always better. It's going to be less hassle. What that means is that the insurance company with a medical emergency, they'll pay from the first dollar with no questions asked. If you have a secondary plan, you still have coverage, but you need to pursue any other insurance companies that might cover that. So that might be your health insurer from home, Medicare, anything else that might cover it. Once you've exhausted all of those other options, they will pay. So, in the end, you're covered with both of these coverages, but primary is simpler. Another thing to

10:41 look for is a pre-existing condition waiver. This would mean that if you're healthy at the time that you bought the insurance, that you would be covered for any recurrence of that condition during your trip. Another minimum that we're looking for with evacuation, that's transportation, is $250,000. I know that seems like a crazy amount of money, but it's pretty easy to get into the six figures with evacuations. And then of course we're looking at trip cancellation coverage for unexpected cancellations. This is when you could lose all your money if you have to cancel the trip right before you go. Now the key here is that the reason you cancel that trip is on the list of covered reasons. This is all in your policy. Now this represents a pretty good list of all the things that are covered with a typical travel insurance policy. It's not everything and every company is a little bit different, but in general it covers things like this. The most common thing

11:26 by far is someone getting sick or injured right before the trip. That could be you, a travel companion, or even a family member that you need to care for. A death in the family is a very common occurrence. Severe weather and hurricane that we talked about, but terrorism, jury duty, all of these other things, house fire, even divorce, theft of your passport right before you leave, or the state department issuing a travel alert of four or more. Like I said, it's a long list of covered reasons, but every plan's a little bit different, so it's good to understand what your plan covers. And before we move on, there is an optional upgrade called cancel for any reason coverage. You've probably heard of it. Here's how it works. It extends that list of covered reasons that we just looked at to everything. So that could mean even if you just decide that you don't want to travel anymore, that's enough of a reason. You can

12:11 cancel and get part of your money back. So the key here is that you buy the plan early, right after your first trip deposit, you need to ensure the full trip cost and you do need to cancel the trip within 48 hours of your departure. And like I said with cancel for a new reason that pays 75% of your trip cost. Everything on the full list of covered reasons reimbures 100%. If it's not on that list and you use cancel for a new reason, 75%. So again, the key here both with this and with the pre-existing condition waiver, the key is to buy early. Usually that window is 10 to 21 days. So now, of course, travel insurance covers other smaller items that aren't as damaging as things like trip cancellation or medical problems. So, of course, travel insurance covers many other smaller items. They're not as big as medical emergencies and evacuations and the trip cost, but it's

12:58 things like lost, stolen, or damaged baggage that covers you for your whole trip, not just on the flight. It can reimburse for delayed trips. So, if you get stuck somewhere on a travel delay, that's covered. It can pay for an extra night in a hotel, extra meals. It can cover you for delayed baggage. If your bag doesn't get there and you need some essential items to hold you over, it will reimburse for that. And of course, 24/7 assistance. This is one of the better parts. It gives you someone to call. Very important in those medical emergencies because they can help arrange care. They can help find the best local hospital. In the end, it's someone to call when something goes wrong and they can help you out. So, let's go back to Covert Trip now and we'll look at those plans and find the best one. So, here we are back on Covert Trip. We have 56 policies to choose from and that's just too many. We need to narrow this down and find the best plans

13:44 at the best price. We'll look at the coverage side by side and see which one stands out. One thing that's easy here before we get to sorting anything is that there is actually a cruise filter. You can see when you hover over this, it automatically filters policies to have those minimums that we talked about. 100,000 for emergency medical and 250,000 for evacuation. So, what we can do is click that on. So, now it's going to sort through all of the plans and find the options that have those minimums. So, now you can see our policies are down to 33 that have those minimum coverages. Now, what we can also do at this point is filter for primary medical. That way, we can see what options are available there. You can see now we're down to 22 policies. And we can also go into

14:30 pre-existing medical. And now you can see we're at 22 policies as well. Now, here's something important to note. Sometimes when you apply filters, you won't see a policy that's an option for you. And here's the reason. Not every plan and option is available in every state to every age group and depending on when you buy insurance policy. So buying early is always better. That will give you the most options. But if you ever apply a filter and see that there's no options for you, it's because you've restricted your choices down to something that you don't have the ability to purchase. So now that we've filtered for cruise that has those minimums, we have primary medical, which is nice to have. We have pre-existing conditions, which is nice to have. I like to go up and sort from low to high. Once you have the plans filtered with those minimum coverages and then those nice to have coverages like primary

15:16 medical and pre-existing conditions, there's no reason to not sort them by low to high and see which one has the best value. So here I'm going to show you how to comparison plan. So you can see these are sorted from the lowest to the highest price and we'll select the three lowest cost plans and see how they compare. Check those. You can compare up to three and click the compare button. Now we're looking at these plans side by side and we can really see the differences. You can see the lowest price is 341 in the middle is 390 and on the higher end is 425. Keep in mind these are the three lowest price plans. And as you scroll down you can compare the coverage details side by side. You can see they all cover that$7,000 for

16:01 cancellation. Some plans cover different amount for trip interruption. And that's if something happens during the trip, you'll be repaid for the remaining portion. You can see these cover 150% of the trip cost and this will cover 200%. So on that particular coverage, this plan scores a little bit better. However, if we look just one line down, you'll see hurricane and weather coverage, there's a delay that needs to occur before your coverage kicks in. 6 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours. So here that plan that was just scoring well for this is a little bit worse because you have to wait a full 24 hours before that coverage kicks in. Whereas 12 and 6 hours is much more reasonable. For hurricanes I always like to choose a plan that offers the hurricane warnings. That means if the NOAA issues a

16:47 hurricane warning, at that point you have coverage to cancel that trip. If you don't have that coverage, a hurricane actually needs to strike and cause damage and interruption for you to claim. So you can scroll down and see all of the differences that we have here. So for example, here is cancelled for any reason. No coverage means that it's not available with this plan. However, with the travelsured plan here, it's just not selected. So you can go in and select that plan. Same with this plan. Going down to emergency medical, you can see 100,000, 100,000, and then this higher price plan does have 150. And same with evacuation, you can see half a million, half a million, and a million. And then down towards the bottom, you'll see those nice to have coverages for things like travel delay, baggage, misconnections, things like that. I always choose based on the big

17:35 important things like primary medical coverage, the coverage limits, and I do like options available for things like cancel for any reason. In this situation, because this plan has primary medical, it meets those minimums, it does offer cancel for any reason as an option, and it's the second lowest price plan. I would choose the travel insured plan here called Flexipax. This does happen to be my favorite plan right now. They just tend to be doing great on the coverage that they offer and the pricing. So, it often ends up at the top of my list when I'm doing comparisons like this. And this plan from them is also only available through comparison sites like this. You cannot get it on the travel insurance website. So, we put in our trooper information. We had 56 policies to choose from. We applied some filters to narrow down those choices. We

18:22 sorted them by price to look at the lowest to the highest so that once it has the coverage that you want that's important to you and those minimums, there's no reason to not get the lowest price plan for the best value. And we've decided on a plan called Flexipax from Travelinsured. So, at this point, you can enroll right online using a credit card and get instant coverage. It's important to note that there's one policy per household. So, if you're traveling with someone else and they live in a different state or a different household, they will need their own plan. To get both the quotes, and then purchase the insurance, you'll need the trip dates, the cost of the trip, the dates of birth for everybody, and then the date of that first payment. And like I said, once you enroll online, you'll get instant confirmation. So, back over here on Covertrip, once you've decided on this plan, you would click buy. So,

19:07 here's the checkout screen for this plan. You can see the plan name and the trip dates and the trip information over here. You would put in the traveler information on the left address down below. This is called flexip packs because there are options for pretty much everything. This is where you would add the cancel for any reason coverage. You can see that it increases the premium amount and pretty much everything else can be adjusted as well. You can increase the emergency medical. There's cancel for work reasons. There's travel delay upgrades, baggage delay upgrades. Again, it includes coverage for all of these, but you can add extra if you like. And then all the way down at the bottom, you'll see the payment information. So, let's talk about those mistakes that you should avoid when you're buying travel insurance. The

19:52 first one, we've already talked about this, is buying from the cruise line. You have one choice from one company. It's a stripped down policy. It's usually more money and it doesn't cover your whole trip like your flights before and the hotel. That's the mistake that most people make. You can avoid it right now by using a comparison site to compare plans, find the best one for your trip. The next mistake is waiting too long to buy. This is important for cancel for any reason coverage and the pre-existing conditions waiver. And I hear this all the time from people. They didn't know they needed to buy early. They'll wait to buy their insurance plan. They'll want things like cancel premaries or preex, but it won't be available because they waited too long. And they'll even say if they knew before, they would have just bought it. And a final mistake that we haven't talked about yet, but is trusting your credit card coverage. There are a lot of credit cards now that say they have

20:38 travel insurance, and they do have some version of travel insurance, but unless you pay a high annual fee on your card, the limits are probably way too low or they don't have good medical or evacuation coverage. I always consider credit card travel insurance to be nice to have for those incidental trips. But for something like a cruise where you're taking all these medical risks by going out on a ship in the middle of the ocean when you're investing a lot of money in the trip that could be lost, I always recommend a separate plan just for that trip. So, let's talk about next steps. You've seen how to look at your coverage, how to look at plans, how to select a plan, but I have all of this summarized in a one-page cheat sheet that you can download below. If you're ready to get a quote, you can gather your trip information and compare quotes. There's a link below. And if you have any question about travel insurance, put it in the comments and I'll answer it for you. That's it for

21:23 now.