Originally Posted by
threeoh
What are you trying to protect against?
If you're hoping Trip Delay will cover your hotel at a connection point if you miss your connection and must stay overnight (or an additional night in HI if your return flight is delayed overnight), only the flight purchased with the CSR will be covered. So if your return flight is on CSR and our outbound is delayed, no coverage.
For Trip Cancellation, which reimburses you for pre-paid nonrefundable things you miss out on, only expenses paid for by the CSR can be reimbursed. So this could be hotel, rental car, etc. if paid with CSR will be covered regardless of how you pay for flights.
For the flights themselves the Trip Cancellation coverage will only pay the change fees (currently there are none) until the ticket expires. If the future flight credit goes completely unused until its expiration date (or you can demonstrate convincingly you will be unable to use it), you can then file a second claim to get the expired value reimbursed.
I think you need to articulate more clearly what scenario you're trying to protect against for us to give you good advice on how to structure the tickets.
I think both, if possible. Also I'm also looking at this from what I'm used to in the past, which is pre-COVID and flying out of a non-hub airport, so probably 80-90% of our trips involved a connection, which is more prone to trip delay.
For
cancelation, I suppose the risk is much more limited now. I have used this before. But hotel will be paid for by the card (and/or points), so I'd be covered there. I think if we pre-pay any additional activities, we should be covered there as well? And with no change fees (I'm not buying BE), I would have the credit to use, so there's almost no case where I wouldn't be able to use that value within a year. So I'm not sure I'd need it there. Trip Interruption is sort of part of the same package though, so always
ideal to have that, but again, with unused hotel/activities, should be covered, and change fees to come back would be nil anyway, and any fare difference isn't covered anyway.
Delay is probably more of a concern on the way home. Since we're now based out of SFO (hub), the flights would be non-stop, and I believe we probably wouldn't be covered on departure from our home airport, correct? At least for overnight - which would be a bigger expense, though maybe they would cover meal if its more than 6 hour delay at the airport if we had that? The return, delay would cover a 6+ hour delay from departure, no? So that would again, be ideal to have.