travel insurance

Medevac insurance is pretty cheap, and the cost of an event can be huge, so it makes sense. Cover with insurance the expenses you can't afford.

Yes, medical insurance is important. What happens if there is a serious illness or injury? Or if one of you needs to be medically evacuated home? If you are all relatively healthy, travel insurance is not expensive. Have a look at an online travel insurance broker like insuremytrip.com. You will be able to compare several policies to see which best meets your needs.

check out "insuremytrip" for lots of good information. I have gone to Europe 16 years in the last 18 and have taken out travel insurance every time. It is a small price to pay considering how much money is committed for my trip. I have added medical options since I turned 65 and when on Medicare who does not cover me in Europe for most things.

We only purchase travel insurance for places that might have environmental issues (major earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.) or experiencing economic or political issues. Another reason we sometimes buy insurance is if we have multiple legged flights through heavily trafficked airports that could inflict delays, cancellations, etc.
We do not usually buy insurance for direct flights or AirBnB places that we have established relationships with owner.

For medical coverage, we check with our employer’s insurance first. Our employer has a separate carrier coverage for international medical expenses.
A few years ago our former medical insurance company had an add on policy we could purchase to cover international medical. You should check with your employer/HR first to see if you have that option too. Would save you some money. Also, if your son is in college, some USA colleges offer medical travel insurance (term coverage) for students.

Hope that helps!

thanks all for the great input. I'm ordering insurance tonight

It costs us nearly $1000 to insure most of our trips at our age, so the idea that this is a cheap expense is often not true. The first thing I would suggest your sister do is check her own insurance -- even our medicare gap policy covers us for 60 days of a trip out of the country up to $60,000. Medical care is much cheaper in Europe than the US. I was in a hospital for 5 days in southern France and had surgery and the bill was about $4000 for excellent care. I did have travel insurance because our trip was longer than 60 days and it paid the whole thing. (when I had the wires removed from my elbow construction a year later in the US, the bill was $18000 for an outpatient surgery and even with Medicare and BCBS medigap policy I had over $1000 out of pocket -- unheard of in Europe.)

The biggest potential expense is medical evacuation home. For many years we had a policy with Medjet Assist that would fly us from a hospital abroad (or more than 300 mi from home) to our local hospital. Never used it so don't know how well it would have worked -- but THIS is the big expense in a medical catastrophe. these are annual policies. When we were working our employer provided insurance always covered us anywhere in the world so we didn't get travel insurance but had this medical evacuation policy. We knew of someone about 20 years ago who had to mortgage their home to get the money to bring their daughter home from Cairo where she had been hit by a car. This cost can easily run 100K. Obviously the odds of needing this go up dramatically as you age, so at this point I am buying travel insurance for each trip.

Can always check out Travel Guard which is an AIG product. $90 each for us (both 60 years old) and purchased through United Airlines. We haven't had to use it to date, however, a friend of ours broke his hip in Barbados, was hospitalized and Medivaced to NJ, all covered under the policy.

They do send out a link for the policy - but each unique to the person insured.

Maybe it will work for your situation as well