Travel insurance is an important part of travel luggage. Yes, luggage, because it’s an essential, just like your plane ticket, accommodation you booked and clothes you packed. We all hope we will never need it, but we travel more freely if we know we have it. Travellers from all over the world are often surprised that we take travel insurance. Why is that? I am surprised that they don’t have it!
Since we started to travel together, it’s almost 19 years now, we ALWAYS take travel insurance. We started with CORIS and sticked with them all this years. We did many crazy and sometimes dangerous things on our travels, like trekking on Bandiagara escarpment in Mali, sleeping on our own on a deserted island for our honeymoon in Madagascar, riding old motorbikes in a desert, go jungle trekking, crossing and sleeping in african wilderness full of wild animals, got stucked on a broken boat in the middle of Indian ocean … We hardly ever needed the insurance’s service. Until recently.
When we were in China in 2016, Mat had a terrible accident in a remote Sichuan valley and on 3700 m altitude he broke his ribs, arm and had bleeding in his lungs. It was a tough rescue, full of complications, but with huge help of Slovenian Embassy in Beijing and Coris Slovenia, we could stabilize him and safely transport him to our home country. It was a very difficult week for our family and I can’t imagine to deal with it without the insurance and it’s 24h assistance. Still now I’m so very grateful for all what they did to provide the best medical help for my husband.
I can’t imagine what would happen if we didn’t take the insurance for that trip. The rescue was worth €50.000 and if we had to pay for it from our money, we would need to sell our house.
So, is it worth to save €100 and don’t pay for travel insurance? I don’t think so. If you take insurance for your car, why would not buy travel insurance? Traveling is an active way to spend your holiday and anything can go wrong. On our travels we met so many people who got malaria, dengue or other medical inconveniences. You never know when you will need to see a doctor. So, better safe than sorry!
Our family does so many things to prevent health troubles on the road:
- we are all vaccinated for typhoid, hepatitis A and B,
- we take anti malaria medications when we are on malarial area,
- we always consult a doctor in the Clinics for travelers in our country before departure,
- when traveling to third world countries we always eat food that can be peeled or that is cooked, never take the oh-looks-so-delicious already chopped fruits from market and never drink beverages with local ice,
- we take a big bag with the essential medicines for all members of our family,
- we always take travel insurance.
We are not obsessed, we just had enough experience with gastrointestinal infections and a severe accident, so we do our best to prevent the worst.
It’s a big chance you will never need your travel insurance assistance, but life on the road is unpredictable and accidents happen. If you are in a foreign country, long way from home, it can be your saver. So be smart and take that insurance before your next trip abroad!
