To Insure or Not to Insure ....that is the question.

The answer- always insure!    I have for years explained to clients the importance of Travel Insurance and have seen many instances over the years when clients would not take my advice and ended up losing a great amount of their money on trips that they had to cancel for things that they never though would happen to them, therefore they didn't take out Trip Insurance.

I will say that for years, I have not listened to my own advice.  Call it stupidity or thinking that I could probably use my clout with vendors to get penalties waived - who knows.  But what I do know is that last year before we took our trip to Paris, for some reason I just didn't feel as though my mom was in the best of health and I FINALLY researched and purchased a Travel Agent annual policy with Travel Guard.  Now granted, Travel Guard has some pretty nice annual products for Travel Industry Professionals, but they have very affordable policies that I sell for clients.   Now that I have this annual policy, they remind me when I need to renew it and I've now had it for two years.

This past October, Bill & I traveled to the East Coast for my cousin's wedding in Connecticut.  We booked a decent airfare with Virgin America, I had some free car rental certificates that covered us for the long weekend.  We were staying with family.  When we landed into JFK and picked up our car, I wasn't thrilled with what we had (in the past with my Hertz Gold, usually there are some pretty sweet upgrade offers for free, so I take my chances with that)- well I ended up negotiating a deal with the sales guy to get my SUV upgrade for $25/day- this 4 day rental would have cost us $100 plus tax.

Then Sunday night came and Hurricane Sandy arrived on the East Coast, fortunately after my cousin's wedding and after we were safely back at the house.  Soon came the calls that my cousin's kids would not have school on Monday, my cousin who drives a school bus would not have work and we were buttoning down the hatches in preparation for possible loss of power, which also means loss of running water in this neck of the woods, then came the text message from Virgin America that our Monday flight was canceled.

We were rebooked for a Tuesday flight, not too bad until we received a text on Monday saying that our flight was canceled again.  I spent 3 hours on hold for Virgin America and once I got in touch with them, the best they could do was rebook us on a Friday flight home from JFK.  My husband needed to be back to work, big projects that needed his attention and that was critical.  I had my laptop, so I was able to work from my cousin's house (fortunately we didn't lose power), but he was stuck.  I had to resort to other options and then the light bulb went off- WE HAVE TRAVEL INSURANCE!   I made a quick call to Travel Guard to confirm what I believed to be true and then made arrangements on another airline to get us home on Wednesday.

We had to fly from Boston to get home, which means we had to change our rental car return.  This meant that my "free day" certificates were no longer applicable and we were stuck with a rental bill of over $700, plus new airline tickets that were almost $1100, and our unused return tickets on Virgin American for $200 - OUCH!   But I knew that the insurance would cover these expenses because our trip was interrupted/canceled due to a covered reason and her name was Sandy, Hurricane Sandy!

Today I received my check in the mail for payment- just about 6 weeks after filing the paperwork.  Usually, claims take about  weeks to process, but given the number of Sandy claims they would have had, plus all of the holidays in between, I thought payment in 6 weeks was perfectly acceptable.

My advice- always insure your trip!