trip insurance -- comprehensive vs medical/evac only

I use DAN - Diver's Alert Network. We only buy evacuation (500K) and medical care (50K) - those are the amounts I purchased for this trip we are about to take. For a different trip, I might purchase a higher limit for medical. We never insure trip costs - just our personal practice.

Our policy - two of us, for nine days - was $120.

Thank you Valerie. That is exactly the type of info I’m looking for.

My plans are for 25 to 35 day trips which may make a difference.

In case it's helpful, I priced their annual policy and it was about $300 per person.

In response to your edited question...I just checked and repriced a 10 day policy for us with DAN. 76 year old was $61. My policy was $55 and I'm 20 years younger.

We always buy medical evacuation insurance. A friend became very ill in Spain and had to pay over $75,000 out of his own pocket to be medevaced home which convinced us to buy a policy.

Since most of our trips are self planned (not tours) they are relatively inexpensive. So we have chosen to self insure the trip costs and purchase only medical insurance that includes evacuation/repatriation. I've used GeoBlue a couple of times and others I've found through squaremouth and insuremytrip. If I were doing expensive package trips or tours I would reconsider buying trip insurance if our out of pocket losses had the potential to be significant.

Depending on your current insurance situation, your agent can probably put something together for less than buying from an online agent. Evac definitely, other expenses perhaps - depending on your health and financial situation.

Our medical insurance here at home does not cover us outside of the US, so we always buy trip insurance for the medical portion.

In the past we have bought policies for each trip, but then did the annual policies through DAN. I was hoping to do that again, but a few months ago when I went back to planning, they specifically said they did not cover Covid. So we purchased a regular plan that did. I just looked and now they do cover Covid. Ugh, I wonder if I can get a refund since we have 3 trips planned so that definitely would be easier to just do the annual plan.

We are in our 40’s with teenage kids and I always get med evac insurance. You never know what’s going to happen. My friend went to Cancun with her family. Her mon fell and broke her hip the day before they were to fly home. The doctors in Mexico said she could fly home the next day as planned: sitting in economy, with two connections and over 14 hours travel time. Can you imagine? My friend called the doctor at home who said “No way!” Thankfully they had med evac insurance and a private medical jet flew down, stabilized the mom, whisked them (friend and her mom) directly from Cancun home.

My nephew was studying abroad in Argentina and his roommate was hit by a car while walking down the road and had life threatening injuries. Again, med evac saved him. You just never know.

I also agree with purchasing Med Evacuation Ins. Many years ago a colleagues son was studying abroad. He did not have Med Evacuation Ins. He had a catastrophic accident and was hospitalized for several months before med evacuated home. As I recall his parents paid well over $100,000 out of pocket.

I get med evac insurance through medjetassist and med insurance thru BCBS (GeoBlue). There is overlap on the med evac but medjetassist controls and gets me home to the hospital of my choiceASAP. I do not intentionally insure my trip portion as it is relatively insignificant.

I think covid proved how unimportant trip insurance is as those without insurance, reading on this forum, didn’t do any worse and when planned well did better than those with insurance. IMO

Thank you Wray. That is the information I was specifically looking for.
Thank you to all others for emphasizing the importance of evac insurance.

If you happen to have a Chase Sapphire Reserve card, it includes medevac insurance for trips of <60 days when you use the card for some of your common-carrier expenses. No experience in actually filing claims.