tbeard

Greetings, I am booking some tickets for my family and parents for Jan. A 5 day vacation. My Dad is not in the best health but wants to see us and his grandkids. I think there is a 50/50 chance he will make the trip. The tickets for my parents are about $500 now and refundable tickets for the same flight are $1800 a piece. My question is when you buy tickets on Delta.com it always asks if you want to protect your trip for xxx. Is this trip insurance that would refund his ticket price if he is too ill to go? I could get regular trip insurance for them. Don't think I would buy the $1800 tickets as if worse came to worse they could still use the $500 tickets minus the change fee for another flight.

slidergirl

I've never looked at that insurance Delta offers, so I cannot comment on it's specifics for coverage. I would suggest you look at 3rd party travel insurance for this. There is a wonderful website where you can look at options to "insure my trip" (hint there - just add a .com). There are some policies that have various cancelation options.

flyerCO

Read the policy. Generally it will exclude any pre-existing conditions. Thus it will most likely not pay if you already know that he may not make it. These policies are known for fighting on even legit claims, but in this case it most likely would be on firm ground to not pay.

Also note that if it does pay for him, it may not cover anyone else. So if Grandma is wanting to fly with him, she may not be covered by the policy if it's Grandpa that is ill.

gooselee

I have never used the insurance sold on DL.com, but there are some very good travel policies out there from TravelGuard and Travelex that I've used in the past.

Not sure if you'll need a "cancel-for-any-reason" policy which can be quite expensive, but there may be a policy that allows you to cancel if you have a dr.'s note for your dad saying basically that at the time of purchase they assumed he'd be fit for travel, but then later determined he would not be. Basically, it all depends on the particular policy.

Hope your Dad stays well!

Zorak

I have bought the trip insurance from Delta from time to time. It is sold by Allianz: https://www.allianztravelinsurance.com/

If you buy directly (not sure if this applies when bought through DL) you can read the policy at final checkout before buying, of course. But in any case here is a direct quote from an upcoming policy I have:

Note that if you buy it directly through Delta, you will only be covering the cost of the airfare. You can subsequently modify your policy to change dates, the amount of coverage, etc.

If you would like to protect multiple travelers at the same time you might want to book directly with Allianz or another provider to make it easier to include everyone at the same time.

Side note for people on different points of the risk aversion curve, another benefit of buying directly from the provider is you don't have to insure the full value of your trip, and can even set it to $0 if you are mainly interested in the medical treatment/evacuation coverage and don't care about trip cancellation/interruption.

A family member recently had to make use of this after taking ill during an overseas tour package. Ultimately the trip was not cut short, but they missed a bunch of the group activities. Allianz covered the cost of a doctor visit (house call in the hotel) and also (to my mild surprise) a pro-rated refund for the portion that was missed, even though the trip was not technically interrupted.

There are provisions for "You or a traveling companion is seriously ill or injured" and "A family member who isn’t traveling with you is seriously ill or injured."

fti

I agree about looking at purchasing your insurance from a third party. The insuremytrip website is a great one for comparison. Cancel for any reason policies are often not that much more expensive actually, but often they are capped at how much you get refunded - if you want 100% refunded then yes they can be fairly expensive.

gooselee

This is actually a really good point I didn't learn about until recently. We've started buying $0 trip-value insurance for all of our international trips, and only insuring trip value for our more significant vacations planned far in advance (and even on some of those we just roll the dice).

Doing it this way basically gives us peace of mind re: medical emergencies, evacuation, and repatriation if something happens while abroad, but the actual premium we pay is very, very affordable.

TTT

IME Delta is very flexible when it comes to medical issues. No, you won't get a refund, but they will likely waive the change fee for future use.

cargo13

Be cautious of the insurance plan offered by Delta.com when booking flights. The fine print is more restrictive than buying a policy direct from the insurance provider.

You are looking for the trip cancellation/trip interruption coverages and not so concerned about the IN TRIP coverages like medical, medivac, etc.
We have found www.csatravelprotection.com to be very affordable. CSA's Custom Luxe plan offers the cancel for any reason that you are looking for but given your flights depart soon (ie, January 2017) the cost wont be prohibitive. I would call CSA for advice if you are not sure. Their customer service is good. We found CSA via the comparison websites but buy direct.

JKPFlyer

someone upstream mentioned pre-existing conditions. Most of the insurance policies that I have bought (directly from the sites) will wave pre-existing clause is you insure you trip within a certain time after making your initial trip payment. But please double check that don't rely only on my word.

rubesl

Go to insuremytrip.com and look for policies that cover pre-existing conditions (there are a lot of them if you buy the insurance within 10 - 20 days of purchasing the tickets - make sure you read the requirements). I have used insuremytrip.com numerous times and filed a $10k+ claim in January (broke my ankle a week before Tahiti) and was paid in full within two weeks,