The short answer is yes. If you need more of an explanation, keep reading. There are a number reasons you may need travel insurance. For one, you can’t see into the future. How do you know what might happen on your trip? For example, what if the hotel you’re staying at had a fire and all your personal belongings were destroyed? If you don’t have travel insurance, you won’t be able to recover your property.
That is exactly what happened to a young woman named Heather. She ventured down to Peru for a month-long teaching trip where she working as a tour guide for an adventure travel agency specializing in community service trips for teenagers. She arrived safely and everything was going great, until a fire broke out. Unfortunately, Heather didn’t purchase travel insurance and most of her stuff was lost.
“My employer recommended a travel insurance package, but between booking flights, packing, and dealing with my job stateside, when it came time to depart, I had totally forgotten to buy health insurance,” Heather said.
Getting ready for a month long trip does entail covering a lot of important details, and for most people buying supplemental trip insurance isn’t one of those.
“It’s always the one time when we forget to buy insurance, or when we think, ‘What can happen in a month?’ that we find ourselves in trouble,” Heather said. “While I was in Peru, one of the hotels that I was staying at burned to the ground. One minute, our group was stargazing and the next minute we were evacuating our hotel.”
“What we thought was a small kitchen fire turned into a full-blown emergency within minutes,” she said. “Most of us didn’t even have a chance to grab shoes, let alone passports, before evacuating. Luckily, the area where our rooms were located did not completely burn that night, and some of the hotel staff were able to recover our bags. They went into the rooms and stuffed whatever clothes we had unpacked into our smokey bags. All of my belongings were damaged by the smoke, and could have been easily replaced…if I had bought insurance. I was just lucky that everyone in my group was safe, but from then on, I vowed never to travel without insurance again,” she said.
After coming home from Peru, Heather was invited to go on a trip of a lifetime. Heather loves to travel and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go to Bali. She always dreamed of surfing the epic reef breaks.
“For my last surf trip to Bali, Arno (Health Is International) recommended a few different options,” she said. “I ended up choosing World Nomads Health Insurance because they would also cover damages to my surfboard if the airline were to accidentally damage it,” she said.
It seems every insurance plan you look at, when you start looking at the exclusions YOUR sport is always excluded. Be it participation in a professional or amateur sports league, mountaineering, paragliding, scuba, you name it, you’re excluded from getting coverage. We offer specific plans by a few select providers will cover you no matter your sport or hobby.
“Arno is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to travel insurance. He always offers a few options, which is nice when you’re considering insurance based on a budget,” Heather said. “He has always been quick to reply to my questions and made me feel confident in my insurance selection.”