Why is Travel Insurance Important While Travelling Abroad?
Holidays and trips help us escape the daily hustle of life and unwind. It always makes us happier and helps us relax in difficult times. As a result, whenever we have a chance, we invent reasons to go out and see all the fantastic places in the world.
Travel usually necessitates careful planning. Most crucially, it also includes “travel insurance”. Well, travel insurance is typically an unneeded cost for most travellers. But what if you get to your destination and discover that you’ve misplaced your luggage or lost your belongings? As a result, the solution is “travel insurance”.
What’s Travel Insurance? Why Is It Necessary to Have While Travelling Abroad?
Well, a travel insurance plan protects you against a variety of risks involved with travelling. It is necessary when you travel abroad, be it for leisure or business reasons since you never know what can happen when you are away from home.
Listed below are some of the reasons why investing in a travel insurance policy is a good idea while travelling abroad:
- Medical Emergency
Though we all make efforts to ensure that our trips go as planned, sometimes it does not. It’ll cost you a lot if you become unwell and require immediate medical attention while travelling. Medical bills and hospitalisation will result in a financial imbalance. Therefore, choosing travel insurance policies for your foreign vacation plans is essential.
- Loss or Delay of Checked-in Baggage
Your travel insurance plan will cover you if you do not get your checked-in baggage on time or if it is lost in transit. Often, airlines provide unsatisfactory replies and urge you to wait for an entire day or just refuse to locate your luggage. In such a case, travel insurance might come in handy.
- Trip Cancellation or Modifications
This might happen if you or one of your family members become unwell or a natural disaster occurs, leaving you with little alternative but to change or cancel your travel plans. Well, cancelling pre-paid travel reservations is costly. When you acquire travel insurance, whether offline or online, you gain the peace of mind that in the event of an emergency, you won’t have to worry about the financial implications of cancelling or modifying your travel plans.
- Flight Delays/Cancellations
Flight rescheduling or delays are regular occurrences when it comes to travelling overseas. If the flight is delayed for over six hours, the insurance provider will repay the amount spent on food, beverages, hotel stays, and so on, subject to the submission of invoices. Also, there may be cases of flight cancellations due to inclement weather conditions and other unavoidable circumstances like medical emergencies, deaths of family members, or the death of a co-passenger’s family member. You could even miss a connecting aircraft. Such charges are covered by travel insurance and shall be mentioned clearly in the policy document.
- Passport Loss
When travelling abroad, passport loss might cause needless costs and complications. International travel insurance typically covers such costs and spares you from trouble.
- Mandatory Requirement
Several nations have made travel insurance mandatory for all visitors. So, before going on a trip overseas, find out if the place you wish to visit has made travel insurance mandatory for outsiders or not. For instance, the Schengen nations require travel insurance in order to grant permission to set foot on their land. Also, you need to have travel insurance in order to obtain a Schengen Visa.
Given all of these advantages, a travel insurance policy is necessary to financially safeguard you and your loved ones while travelling abroad.
Travel Insurance: How Does It Work?
Most travel insurance policies compensate you for covered financial losses when you make a claim, which is accepted. Filing a claim entails providing Tata AIG with documentation of your loss so that we may verify what happened and compensate you for your covered losses. You may make a claim for travel insurance online or use our mobile application.
In reality, how does this work? There are several benefits of travel insurance. Assume you purchased the Tata AIG Travel Guard Policy, which includes flight cancellation benefits, to safeguard your planned Cozumel cruise. You have a high temperature and chest ache two days before your flight. Your medical practitioner diagnoses you with bacterial pneumonia and tells you to cancel your vacation. But now, if you cancel the flights, you will not get any refund.
Luckily, a serious, incapacitating sickness is a covered cause for flight cancellation, meaning you may be compensated for your flight fare. When you feel better, you gather the necessary documentation, such as your airline receipts and make a claim.
The Bottom Line
Most people consider travel insurance an unnecessary cost, and many tourists are of the same question: why acquire travel insurance and what’s the main purpose of having it? To begin, travel insurance, like immunisations, is one of the many things you should have while travelling abroad. Aside from being a legal need, travel insurance protects you against various emergencies, as previously stated. For all of these reasons, travel insurance is unquestionably necessary and a very wise investment to make before travelling overseas.
At Tata AIG, we put forward a range of international travel insurance plans for you at competitive rates. If you are planning to visit a foreign nation for business or leisure purposes, make sure you get yourself and your family covered with a robust Tata AIG family travel insurance plan. For more information regarding travel insurance, you can contact us at any time of the day. We will be glad and delighted to help you!