All credit card insurance basically amounts to "Trip Insurance Lite" with narrow sets of clauses that have the potential to pay out, but not necessarily covering all (or even a majority) of the events that could make your trip be problematic.

For example, right now airlines are cancelling flights left and right. While Amex offers more generous terms than Chase in that they cover additional/alternate transportation, they will only pay for economy class tickets regardless of the original class you had booked, and cancellations by the airline not due to weather or terrorism basically aren't covered.

I recently picked up insurance for a Christmas Mediterranean cruise we are taking and the supplier we used (TravelInsured) offered both Cancel for Any Reason and Interruption for Any Reason options to the trip policy. As part of trip interruption they will pay for the cost of flights to get you to your tour/cruise or back home in the original class booked, although the "for any reason" option is capped at 75% of the total insured trip cost. Even without the "For Any Reason" provisions, the TravelInsured policy covers 30 non-health hazards in addition to 3 health-related hazards for a base total of 33 situations in which you can make a claim. By comparison, Amex offers 7 covered hazards, and they are very specific and narrow.

The TravelInsured policy also gives you the option to request a medical evacuation to a hospital of your choosing, so you can make the request to get back to health care here in the states. Since the policy also includes travel medical, this aligns the interest of the trip insurance company with your own interests, because they're off the hook for medical costs once you get back home and your primary medical insurance takes over responsibility for your care.

If you normally wouldn't buy trip insurance, the Amex "free" insurance is fine. Maybe it pays out, maybe it doesn't - but at least it gives you a possibility of maybe recovering some money. If the insurance is more important to your situation, then I think it really is worth your time to download the Policy of Insurance from a few different trip insurance providers and compare it to what Chase and Amex offer. I think it will become overwhelmingly clear in a short amount of time that these policies are largely similar in the "brochure name" only.

Note: I'm not saying TravelInsured is the best and please don't take this as an endorsement of that product, that's just who we ended up with after researching on tripinsurancestore.com - there are tons of policies out there you can find on sites like squaremouth, tripinsurancestore, and others.