You’ve probably seen this on paragraph TripInsuranceStore.com. If not, here it is for your convenience:

Buying travel insurance is a risk: You are trading a known certainty (your hard earned money) for an unknown quantity - the promise of the insurance policy doing what it says it will do. This is why we pre-screen our plans.

The promise by the travel insurance company to pay is based on the policy’s wording - commonly known as the “Certificate of Coverage”. Unfortunately, the majority of buyers (and in my opinion sellers, too) only read the policy brochure.

Why do I think this is “unfortunate”? It’s because a travel insurance company has spent thousands of dollars and hired skilled and competent lawyers to write their travel insurance policy’s wording. I don’t believe the “good travel insurance companies” are out to trick anyone with obscure words and semantics games.

They are trying to explain what is, at best, a complicated set of concepts and ideas, in a way their customers can understand. From the customer’s point of view, this may seem nearly impossible, though.

Let’s say you are looking for travel insurance. Where do you start? In a nutshell, you start with asking the right questions, reading the fine print and making sure that you’re actually getting what you think you’re buying.

But, what are the right questions? That’s what I’m going to make the subject of some future posts. Stay tuned.