Trip Insurance: Read the Fine Print

Already one of the most confusing elements of a travel purchase, trip cancellation and interruption insurance has become even more convoluted since Sept. 11--and a major consideration when you’re faced with making large, nonrefundable payments long before departure.

As consumer advocate Ed Perkins noted in a recent column for the travel site Smarter Living (www.smarterliving.com/columns/ed), “Before Sept. 11, many trip cancellation insurance policies included coverage for supplier failure. Following the attack, however, a handful of companies withdrew that coverage from new policies, and others limited their coverage to a specific list of tour operators and cruise lines.

“When unexpected illness or accident was the main reason to cancel a trip, I recommended that travelers shop for the lowest price,” Perkins added. “Now I recommend shopping for the best coverage--for both terrorism and possible supplier failure. The issue now isn’t a small price difference; it’s a big difference in potential recovery.”

While there are some glaring discrepancies in the amount of travel insurance information you’ll find online, the Web is a good place to start the hunt.

Once you do make a choice, most insurers provide online enrollment and claim forms.

Though it doesn’t address post-Sept. 11 changes, the insurance primer on the Independent Traveler site (www.independenttraveler.com/resources, then click on “money & insurance”) provides a good overview and links to several insurance companies, including such major players as Travel Guard International (www.travelguard.com) and Travelex (www.travelex-insurance.com). (Two other heavyweights that aren’t on the Independent Traveler list: Access America, www.accessamerica.com, and CSA Insurance Services, www.csatravelprotection.com.)

A helpful site called TripInsurance.net (tripinsurance.net) offers succinct, side-by-side comparisons of travel policies from eight providers, including the leading four.

The site’s “financial default” line lets would-be travelers see at a glance, for example, that CSA offers no coverage whatsoever if your tour company or cruise line goes belly up--and that Access America covers “selected carriers, if purchased within 14 days of initial trip deposit.”

But to get to the nitty-gritty, you’ll have to keep clicking--and you may not like what you find.

Because TripInsurance.net does not list terrorism as a separate category, you’ll have to scroll through the “policy highlights” to learn what they include.

For example, Travelex covers “terrorism in a country which is part of the covered trip which causes the United States Department of State to issue a travel warning that you should not travel within that country for a period of time that would include the covered trip.”

Travel Guard covers “a terrorist incident in a city to which the insured is scheduled to arrive within 30 days following the incident.”

Insurers’ own sites may provide even more current information on the constantly shifting post-Sept. 11 landscape.

Click on Travelex’s “special notices” link, for example, and you’ll find a list of airlines, cruise lines and tour operators that Travelex will no longer insure.

The home page for Access America, meanwhile, touts its new “Free-to-Go” terrorism provision, included as part of the company’s existing trip cancellation/interruption policies.

But keep reading: Among the restrictions are exclusions “for cities in which a terrorist incident has occurred within 30 days prior to purchase of insurance; for cities in which large, multi-day public events attended by more than 50,000 people (the Olympics, for example) are taking place during any portion of your trip; and for terrorist incidents involving biological, chemical or nuclear agents.”

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Electronic Explorer appears once a month. Laura Bly can be reached at LSBly@aol.com.