Do your travel insurance plans cover the flight portions of our trip we bought with frequent flyer miles? Carole

Even though this sounds like a simple question, the answer’s a bit complicated. That’s because you must count frequent flyer tickets, award travel, vouchers, reward points & credit card miles as a $0 trip cost. The value is not equal to the money you save by using them. Your trip cost is only the taxes you pay when you exercise them.

However, some travel insurance plans will pay the fee to re-deposit the miles into your frequent flyer account if the claim is for a covered reason.

You can learn a lot more about how frequent flyer miles are covered here, too.

Security Line travel delays take longer than expected. You have to plan enough time between flights to account for a longer-than-expected wait.

Why is this important, even if you have travel insurance?

The reason why is because a common travel insurance exclusion is “Any government regulation or prohibition”. Every policy words this a little differently, but in essence, Security Line travel delays aren’t covered. This includes waiting to get through airport security.

We find that few people build in enough time, so they inadvertantly end up with some kind of delay in an airport somewhere. And, more often than not, they think, “I don’t have to hurry. I have travel insurance.”

I’m sorry if I’m too honest here, but it’s better to know how travel insurance works before you spend any money on it.

Yes, you read that right: “Santa Clause Gets Free Travel Insurance”. By special arrangement, www.TripInsuranceStore.com is giving Santa Clause free travel insurance for Christmas 2007.

What if Santa gets sick or injured and can’t deliver his presents this year? You don¹t have to worry about that because Santa’s getting free travel insurance this year.

“Santa Clause is such a vital part of Christmas, it’d be a tragedy if something happened to him and he had to cancel his trip”, says Steve Dasseos, a leading travel insurance authority. “Everybody just assumes Santa’s showing up. Once we found out Santa hadn’t thought of getting travel insurance, we decided to give it to him free of charge.”

Learn more

When you buy travel insurance, you want to be sure the travel insurance pays the claims. Here are some things you can do to help your travel insurance claim be processed quickly and correctly:

Tip #1: If you get sick or injured prior to or on your trip, it’s important you go to a doctor. If you don’t go to a doctor, the insurance company won’t believe you were sick or injured. Here’s how the policies typically read:

“For Trip Cancellation benefits, an actual examination by a licensed Physician must take place before the cancellation is made. For Trip Interruption benefits, this examination must take place during Your Trip.”

Tip #2: A lot of information is required when making a claim, even a small one. Keep a log of people spoken to. Don’t forget to keep receipts issued for services including items purchased if you have a travel or baggage delays.

Tip #3: If you ever need to file a claim, write a cover letter with a synopsis of your claim to send with the claim form.

Tip #4: Keep copies of everything you submit with your claim forms. You wouldn’t believe how many people don’t keep a copy. And, those are usually the ones whose paperwork seems to get lost in the mail!

In addition, travel insurance plans give you assistance services including the use of a multi-lingual 24-Hour Emergency Hotline, which you can call collect from anywhere in the world.

Here’s an important tip when calling the 24-Hour Emergency Assistance Hotline: Before you call them, get a phone number where you can receive a call. That way, if you are either unexpectedly cut off or you are incurring charges to make the call, they can call you on their own dime (at their own expense).

Go here to find the 24 hour phone numbers & Travel Insurance Claim Contact Information for the 6 Travel Insurance companies we trust.

Just to make sure we all are talking about the same thing, here’s how a Top-Up Travel Insurance Plan works for any Canadian resident and for Snowbirds in particular:

Your Provincial Emergency Medical coverage typically covers you out ot province for up to 60 days usually at no additional cost. After the 60 days you are on your own to find insurance. A policy you’d get that starts after the 60 days is called a “Top-Up Travel Insurance Plan”.

Travel health insurance plans are commoly sold as “Top-Up Travel Insurance Plans”. The drawback is that since you aren’t covering 100% of your trip’s length, you have to use a travel health insurance plan. The reason I’m telling you travel health insurance plans aren’t the best choice is because they usually have a strict definition of what constitutes a pre-existing medical condition. Here’s a typical definition:

A pre-existing condition is defined as any injury, illness, sickness, disease, or other physical, medical, mental or nervous condition, disorder or ailment that, with reasonable medical certainty, existed at the time of application or at any time during the three years prior to the effective date of the insurance, whether or not previously manifested or symptomatic, diagnosed, treated, or disclosed prior to the effective date, including any subsequent, chronic or recurring complications or consequences related thereto or arising therefrom.

If this sounds restrictive, you’re right. If you have no other choice, getting this Travel health insurance plan is far better than having no coverage at all. Go here if you’d like to see this plan.

You have another choice: It’s getting a regular travel insurance plan. This may sound too simple & a waste of money since it will cover you for your entire trip’s length (ovelapping the first 60 days with your provincial plan). The fact is that you will get a far better plan at a better price and you can cover stable pre-existing medical conditions without a premium increase. In fact, you won’t have any medical forms to fill out, either.

Go here if you’d like to see this Snowbird travel Insurance plan.

We’re buying a trip with our credit card award points and frequent flyer miles for the airline portion. If we cancel the trip for a covered reason how will the travel insurance pay us? Ruth & David

This is a complicated question, but that’s OK ’cause I like complicated questions.

While it may seem like all free travel’s the same (since you’re getting the trip for free), the fact is that travel insurance plans don’t cover them the same way. Here are some tips so you can be prepared:

• For trip cost purposes, count frequent flyer tickets, award travel, vouchers, reward points & credit card miles as a $0 trip cost. The value is not equal to the money you save by using them. Your trip cost is only the taxes you pay when you exercise them.
• Many (not all) frequent flyer programs have a re-deposit fee to put the miles back into your account.
• Does your award travel, vouchers, reward points or credit card miles allow you to re-use them if you don’t use the travel you get with them?

You can get more information here:
http://www.tripinsurancestore.com/3/frequent-flyer.shtml