[James]

Travel Insurance Questions
Our family of five is planning several international trips this year to Asia and Europe.

We don’t have any existing health issues.
We are looking into insurance coverage for emergency evacuations and medical care.

I purchase trip tickets with an Amex Platinum card, which includes emergency evacuation coverage.

Do I need additional travel insurance? If so, which company would you recommend?

I’m considering some annual plans that cost around $500.
We have a strong emergency fund that could be used for medical expenses abroad if needed.

We also have Cigna health insurance in the U.S., if that makes a difference.

Additionally, I’m curious if travel insurance provides benefits beyond financial coverage—such as handling all logistics for medical transportation and care—so we wouldn’t have to coordinate everything ourselves in an emergency.

I’d appreciate any insights.

Thanks in advance!

[Rick]

Here are a few to check out
Cigna Global – this may already be part of your comment on Cigna.
Safetywing

Genki
The second and third are often recommended by YouTubers.

Now these usually come with affiliate links but that is simply a business model and not a red flag.

We have used safetywing a few times (including right now in Guatemala) but have not yet had a need for a claim so I cannot comment on that.

[Barbara]

I haven’t looked at the Amex insurance closely, since I don’t usually rely on credit card coverage for medical insurance.

However, in general emergency medical evacuation will only cover transportation to the nearest suitable medical facility, as determined by the insurance company.

If you’re traveling close to major cities with medical centers, that’s probably fine.

Since we often travel to very remote areas so we have a separate policy that will take us to whatever hospital we choose.

Also note that in many insurance policies “repatriation” often just means repatriation of remains, not getting you back home if you’re sick – be sure to check the terms closely.

[Jenny]

I’m in Canada so it may be different but we buy medical/travel insurance yearly. It costs between $100-300/trip (family of 4) but if we get yearly coverage it’s only $400 for all of us.

we’ve been paying for years even though we don’t travel that much…the insurance is with the same company that insures our house & car.

[Marcy]

We purchased Allianz annual plan a few years ago for an EU trip. We were delayed on both ends and there was no issues or really any questions when I submitted a claim.

Super easy process.

[Ron]

I’m more familiar with Nomad insurance, though I never signed up. A lot of them exclude specific activities, which could be common things like skiing, ziplining and …

well, I’ve read through policies in the past, but don’t recall the specifics.

Anyways, if you are planning to do anything relatively active, I would read the fine print, or in many cases that I looked at it wasn’t really fine print but basically the policies had specific activities listed for specific tiers of coverage.

Anyways, the policies I explored allowed you to list countries and timeframes in months and gave you varying prices depending on where you were.

You might want to search “nomad health insurance”.

I forget the names of the ones I was looking at, but I’m sure they’re easy to find.

[Tony]

Whenever I travel internationally (2-3x year), I do a search on Squaremouth, which is an aggregate of most travel insurance providers. Just pop in the required info and run a search.

The only downfall of premium travel credit cards is that they don’t typically cover repatriation – which can be quite significant OOP, but very affordable via travel insurance.

Before you go anywhere or buy anything, you should learn how primary vs secondary insurance works, which is basically how travel insurance works with your current insurance to resolve claims.

[Author]

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