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Have you used trip insurance program Emergency Assistance Plus via American Airlines?

I receive this advertisement every couple of months through my membership in the American Airlines Advantage program. You pay upfront for a one-year membership, get a free member guide after registering and have a month after signing up to cancel. Just checking their website, I still had questions and called
them. I found out that there are no age restrictions and that this is strictly a medical evacuation program in an emergency anywhere in this country and most of the world. They pay no medical bills but facilitate your care and will ship you home dead or alive, if they determine the emergency is real. I'd be interested to know if anyone on this board has had experience with them.

The "no age restrictions" make this program interesting for me.

Checking the reviews about their services, I found conflicting information from great to useless. For sure, you have to cancel some time before expiration or they charge you automatically. The fine print says so but it seems not everyone has read this.

Posted by
2574 posts

I signed up for it but fortunately have not have to uae it. I later got a flyer for it from AAA. Thru AAA it is cheaper

Posted by
3039 posts

I just got the same ad in the mail. I haven't read the details yet. However, my first reaction is that I travel so little that travel insurance would be a better choice, more inclusive for me. I'd like to hear from someone who has used AA's program. We're leaving for a road trip in a month through the Pacific Northwest, travelling for a month and you never know what can happen. My experience with an emergency clinic on the Oregon coast last trip was not good (colitis attack, then drug reaction), but insurance paid and my husband drove.

Posted by
5398 posts

Do they list the coverage limits ($$$$) of the policy?
Have you compared their prices and coverage, and especially, exclusions, to other evacuation/repatriation companies like Medjet Assist?
Have you looked at travel insurance policies that include medical evacuation as part of the medical insurance coverage? This is the option that we chose. We have an annual policy, since we travel more than once a year.

Posted by
1673 posts

You state that this policy pays no medical bills. What happens if you are too sick to travel back home immediately? It happened to my brother-in-law.

Posted by
63 posts

To Clean: yes, I have looked at other policies that include evacuation insurance. Due to my age, they are either prohibitively expensive - I only found one that would even insure me, and it was very limiting and only for one month - or they wont insure me at all. I plan to look at the website again and find the name of the parent company and check it out, too, just to get an idea of how they perform. If it checks out, it could definitely be useful to me.

Posted by
63 posts

To Gundersen: From what I gathered from their website (not so much from the enrollment form) is that they will facilitate hospital and doctor care but will not pay for it. Your own insurance and you will have to pay. According to the website, once a doctor/hospital declares you too sick to travel and they can't give you proper care, then this policy seems to kick in but at their discretion. This latter is where it gets iffy, I think. However, if you need it, it seems they also pay for someone to accompany you. It did not say anything about how you travel back.

Posted by
23604 posts

We used this company as our evac policy for the past three years. If we need it, I hope it works. The trouble with most of these insurance policies/programs is that they basically are untested. Maybe you can find one or two people who have used but those odds are low. You read the fine print several times and hope for the best.