It protects the financial investment of your trip. If your plans are cancelled before your departure date, or interrupted after it has begun as the result of a covered risk, you could be reimbursed for your expenses. Non-refundable pre-paid expenses, such as airline tickets and cancellation penalties, and additional costs that can arise, could be covered. You can add trip cancellation/trip interruption/trip disruption insurance to a travel medical insurance policy. Or if you have confirmed out-of-province medical coverage through your employer or credit card, it can be purchased as its own policy. Please see policy wording (PDF) booklet for more details. You can add the following options to a trip cancellation/trip interruption/trip disruption policy: Provides coverage when a flight is delayed more than 4 hours and/or when the baggage is lost or delayed more than 6 hours. Provides coverage for the loss, damage or theft of baggage, personal effects and/or currency.
Provides payment to the insured or their beneficiary in case of death or dismemberment as a result of a covered accident. Includes Baggage Insurance and TravelGold® Accident Insurance.I got all the prices below and information in 2012 2014 2015. I’ve verified all of the prices and policies as of 2016. Travel insurance can kill a travel budget for anyone. We feel the pinch especially hard, since we’re buying travel insurance for a family of four. When I searched high and low for travel insurance comparisons and reviews for our upcoming trip, I found absolutely nothing (other then the awesome Kanetix ) that would help me compare prices and insurance. So I had to do hours of legwork to get the best prices and policies, and I’ve shared them in this review. For six months of travel, for a family of four, we got quotes ranging from $418.51 to a whopping $2,461.92 for worldwide travel medical insurance, including the USA. Prices and policies can change almost overnight, so do your own research.
This travel insurance review should give a great starting point, though. All prices are in Canadian dollars, although some of the companies (especially World Nomads) will cover people all around the world. A quick explanation before I name names and point fingers in the review. Travel insurance almost always means medical travel insurance, which includes set amount of coverage (usually one to five million dollars per person for travel accidents and illness). Many travel insurance packages include coverage for baggage, trip cancellation, trip interruption and even emergency dental. Only buy what you need, and you’ll save a lot of money. World Nomads travel insurance, available through Lonely Planet, was one of the cheapest policies we found, that also happens to include a lot of extras like trip cancellation and coverage for sports. World Nomads travel insurance is underwritten by Travel Guard AIG Insurance Company of Canada. When we took our trip, I didn’t know about World Escapade
However, I’ve included them in this 2014 update, as they offer one of the cheapest plans available, and they would have definitly made our short list. TuGo (formerly called Travel Underwriters) is one of Canada’s biggest travel insurance companies, and they surprised us with one of the best rates. We signed up with TD Meloche Monnex: Wide Horizons Solution on our last six month trip though Costa Rica, Mexico, Florida and Texas. Although we didn’t have to make a claim, their customer service was extremely professional and patient when answering all of my questions about the quote. We used travelcuts Globetrotter insurance for our last trips to Asia and the Philippines. We ended up claiming a few days in a hospital in Thailand, and travelcuts was great to us. If we’d been a single traveller on this trip, then travelcuts would probably have been our first choice for insurance. With a whopping 547 days for a maximum policy length, travelcuts is a well worth looking at if you’re planning a longer trip.
travelcuts has several plans, but we were interested only in the Emergency Medical Plan D. This plan does not include trip cancellation or trip interruption insurance. itravel2000 is one of my favorite sites to search for cheap all-inclusive last minute getaways and hotel rooms, so I thought I’d check out their travel insurance. BMO travel insurance is one of Canada’s biggest names in travel insurance, so I thought I’d try them out. Sunova Credit Union with purchase of Sunova Gold credit card with $65 annual fee. The Sunova credit card issued by a small credit union in Manitoba, Canada, but based Desjardins credit card. If a Sunova card isn’t an option, a Desjardins card is very similar. The fees and details for the Desjardins card may vary a bit. is on online insurance quote consolidator. I’m a big fan. They’ll let you compare a number of quotes side by side, and they’re usually a fairly good deal. They do all sorts of insurance, including home, auto, and tenant’s insurance.
The best deals on Kanetix For trips of 60 days or less, consider getting a credit card with medical travel insurance. These often offer trip cancellation and interruption, along with baggage insurance. For Canada travel insurance, the cards we looked at were Sunova’s (Desjardins Travel Visa) Gold card ($65 annual fee, which included travel insurance), and BMO’s Air Miles Mosaic Gold Card (which charged $99 for travel insurance on top of the annual credit card fee). Note: If you decide to use only your credit cards built in travel insurance, make sure that you’re covered for the duration of your trip (you can often extend coverage for an additional fee) and that you qualify since some cards that include travel insurance have specific riders that might not cover you if you fall outside of their policies parameters. Baggage coverage insures your bags while in transit (in airplanes, though this may extend to buses and taxis). Personal effects coverage covers your belongings anywhere, on any portion of your trip.
This sounds nice in theory, but I found that most policies had some serious exclusions. They would only cover losses with a police report (makes sense, but a police report can be pretty damn hard to get in a lot of countries). On top of that, most policies would not insure belongings that were unattended. That means that if your wallet is stolen from your beach chair while you’re body surfing, you’re out of luck. Even more important, most policies wouldn’t cover loss or theft of computers, cameras, or cell phones, or jewelery. The only expensive things most people travel with aren’t covered. Here’s a little trick, though. If you have insurance on your home or tenant’s insurance, then your belongings might be covered on your trip. Usually there’s a limit (around 10% of the total coverage on your original policy), and your deductible applies to any claims while travelling. World Nomads had pretty good coverage for personal effects, including computers and camera equipment.
Trip cancellation and interruption generally only cover the portion of your trip that you buy before you leave. Not especially useful for us, since we’re only buying a one-way ticket to Mexico before we leave, and the rest of our tickets will be bought once out of Canada. Not having a set itinerary means that we’ll buy onward legs (by plane, train, car, taxi, water taxi, ferry, cruise liner, or bus) as we need them. I couldn’t find a single travel insurance policy that would cover purchase of additional legs once we left home. Trust me, I tried. A lot of Canada travel insurance reviews don’t mention this, but it’s important: If you’re gone for more than six months, ensure you get a written extension from your provincial health care plan (this applies only to Canadians). We’ve had so many great responses to this article that we realized that other travellers were having the exact same problem we had: There are no good websites that do a good job of reviewing and comparing Canadian travel insurance.