Sunday, August 15, 2010

Do you need travel insurance....the worst can happen, even to you!

People ParkImage by Always at Home via Flickr
Shanghai China by b
I asked my daughter-in-law to give me the ultimate travel tip the other day. She and my son travel around the world as international educators teaching in Shanghai and putting on workshops for the Apple Corporation in Singapore. Her answer caught me by surprise...Expect the worse was her answer. I had no idea that she felt that much could go wrong because they seem to fly off into the unknown without a thought or fear. EXPECT THE WORSE made me stop in my tracks!

So, what is the worse? Then it began coming back to me...all those stories I had hear from friends. I had even forgotten our very own horror stories. She is entirely right. When we expect the worse, we prepare for it and life can go on while we are on vacation.

I have had my passport stolen by a gypsy in Spain. We were sitting in a restaurant in Plaza Major drinking a beer when a lady walked by with a baby swaddled in a shawl over her shoulder. The purse was gone when I got up to leave. I did not even see it disappear. My passport was gone as well as one of our credit cards. (Thankfully we had been smart enought to make copies of the Passport and had left a credit card in the hotel safe.) In the police station I went to so I could report the theft, a German man sat next to me. He was shaken because a thief had held a knife to his throat demanding his money. The only thing he had left was his cell phone!

A friend of mine waited as her father was evacuated from a cruise ship in the Mediterranean after suffering a stroke. Hurricanes have interrupted other peoples trips as have family illness that did not allow them to leave on the appointed day. We knew people caught without insurance after 9/11 and had to sacrifice vacation money they had saved for a retirement trip because they were scheduled to go into what had become a war zone. Many years ago we were caught on the East coast of the USA after the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island malfunctioned and United Airlines went on strike.  On that same trip I caught the flu on the first few days of the trip.  If there had been anyway that I could have come home early I would have.
 
My husband and I scheduled a trip to Mexico for November to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. We bought trip cancellation insurance because we are not young anymore. We have come to realize the dreaded "worst" can happen even to us.  Do some research and see if you might need to think about insurance.  If you are taking the trip of a lifetime and you have been saving for years to pay for this very costly trip, you might consider some kind of insurance.   After all it just makes good sense.

b

Read more at Travel Insurance for Dummies or always expect the worst!
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3 comments:

  1. After living in europe for seven years and traveling before that, I am one of those people who believe the trip iself is generally the adventure. The whole process not just the "destination". That said, I agree, one should be prepared for anything, especially when tour companies go out of business and so on. be ready!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree...one should not travel and be afraid. Most people are very nice. This post was simply to raise your awareness and ask you to be prepared. There can be no whining when you are traveling. Attitude is the key...and rolling with the punches!

    b

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