Travel insurance

If you are a Costco member, you can buy travel insurance thru Costco which is very cost effective. In order to do the purchase, you will need to rent a car or stay at least one night in a Costco booked hotel during the travel period. For instance, you can rent a hotel room for one night before the trip, and include that hotel rental timeframe in your trip insurance. The price is great, and the coverage is good.

Try a site like Insure My Trip. You can comparison shop based on your needs, ages and state of residence. Any questions and you can use the chat function for clarification.

Lots of into here, including the 2 comparison sites mentioned at the bottom of the box on the right.
https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/trip-planning/travel-insurance

There are so many types of insurance and so many different needs to consider and your question doesn’t explain why you want insurance.

• How old are you?
• How is your health?
• What are your concerns?
• Are you driving a rental car?
• What is your risk tolerance?
• Does your health insurance provide coverage for care when you travel to Europe for less than 60 days
• Does your credit card take care of a collision damage waiver (CDW) if you rent a car on that card?
• When you got your airline tix, did you get flight insurance?
• Are you checking your bags, or taking them on-board the plane with you? If the latter, will you meet the size and weight restrictions that the airlines you are flying have, or will you then be forced to check your bags?

I never really worried about insurance when we travelled internationally in 1999, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2023 or 2024. THIS YEAR, I finally decided to worry and look into this. Why? Because we are in our 70s and we will be cycling in Europe. Last year when we cycled in Puglia we both fell on a wet road (without any injuries to speak of, fortunately). Also, we have friend who needed to get hospital care and extend her stay in France for several weeks until she could safely fly.

Trip cancellation insurance looked spendy and not worth it … as far as my own, personal risk tolerance to expense ratio is concerned.

To my pleasant surprise, thanks to recommendations on this forum 1-1/2 years ago when I was simply concerned about auto insurance, I checked our credit card and learned it will cover the CDW on a rental car. This year, I checked our Medical Supplemental Insurance (supplemental to Medicare) and learned it covers $50,000 for a European trip up to 60 days.

What others on this forum got me to look was medical evacuation coverage, especially since we will be biking 13 days of our 30-day trip next month. That is the one potentially huge expense, not already largely protected.

Someone (LizinPA) suggested the RS article, on-line. It’s an OK start and I think it may be better now than it was 6 months ago. But my own journey through this forum and the kindness of others who responded to my query might also help you. See https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/travel-in-urance there are lotsa links in there.

(The forum somehow changed in$urance in my topic title to in-urance in the link)

The forum is searchable, so you can look in the upper left corner of your screen and find the search feature. Many others have asked about insurance and many have given good advice.

Happy - and safe - travels.

Do not ever purchase IMG (International Medical Group) travel insurance as they will for months put obstacles in your path to get you to give up so they can avoid paying you. Here are some of the obstacles: They don’t have a clear policy about how and where to file the claim. The staff lie to you- we were told we had to wait 3 weeks for a claim to be posted and wasted that time waiting. Not only was that false, but IMG had lost the claim we had filed online. We then had to complete a written form and return it to them. Although we traveled together our claims were dealt with separately, which made it much more difficult. We ended up having different claim numbers, different agents, and had to submit each document twice. No matter how many times we submitted a document, they claimed to not have received it. We cannot count how many times we submitted the same paperwork over and over. After almost 2 months we finally contacted the broker who sold us the insurance. They finally intervened and several weeks later (after we submitted all the supporting documents to them) we got paid. One of us was paid about 2 weeks after the other. It is very clear this company does not operate in good faith and their goal is to make it so hard to actually get paid that you will give up in total frustration.