Annual Travel Insurance Plans a Better Fit for Many Modern Travellers
Travelling out of the country more than once a year? Trying to keep your options open? Looking for ways to seriously wind down the costs of travel insurance without diluting your coverage? Consider annual, multi-trip plans. Here’s how they work.
If you travel out of the country two or three or more times a year; if you like to take short, frequent trips; or, if you normally spend six winter months in the South but would like to return “home” for one or two weeks with the kids at Christmas, consider an annual, multi-trip plan. It can be a lot cheaper and can give you more flexibility than buying two single-trip plans.
Annual plans are becoming increasingly popular with our more mobile population, and what’s best about them is that almost all travel insurers in the Canadian marketplace offer them. Sometimes, though, you need to ask.
Here’s how they work:
An annual, multi-trip plan offers you a choice of out-of-province travel segments—15, 30, 60, 90 days or more—this varies from insurer to insurer and in the number of travel days offered. This means you can take an unlimited number of trips up to the given number of days selected, throughout the year, and you don’t have to advise your insurer ahead of time when you are taking those trips. You just sign up for the annual plan, pay your premium and go. The restriction is that you cannot exceed the number of days selected (e.g. 15 days) on any one travel segment, and you must return home for at least one day before starting out on the next segment. You also cannot combine segments back to back. If you need to add a few days to one of these segments, you can have insurer “top up” the needed number of additional days.
It’s like insuring you for four shorter trips per year without doing all the extra paperwork. Also, all travel insurance plans are priced on the length of time you will be out of the province and, therefore, exposed to foreign medical costs. The longer the trip, the greater the per diem cost. Why? If you are a golfer and you want to insure yourself against being hit by lightening, your chances of being hit are greater if you are out on the course 150 times a year as opposed to 10 times. Your exposure to the elements is simply greater.
But there are a couple of things to watch out for when you buy an annual plan.
If you generate a claim, you may have to prove the incident occurred during one of your designated number-of-day segments. You may be asked to show travel documents, credit card receipts, etc, to verify when you left your province and returned during that particular trip.
Also, if you generate a medical claim during one of your segments, you will be expected to notify your insurer of such a claim and the reason for it as it may be considered a pre-existing condition for any subsequent segments. For example, if you have an appendicitis attack during one segment of a 30-day trip, you will likely not be covered for anything related to that condition for your subsequent trip segments. Your insurer needs to know so it can recalibrate your coverage conditions and possibly readjust your premium for the remaining segments. And don’t assume that because you filed a claim with one arm of the company (the claims arm), the other arm (the sales arm) automatically knows about your claim. In big companies, people over “here” don’t always talk to people over “there.” Still the savings you can gain by using an annual plan can be significantly lower than taking two or three single trip plans, so investigate the option.
