The journey is part of the adventure. That's one of our favorite sayings at CruiseNReview Travel Advisors. Some journeys are more of an adventure than others.
On our recent 7-Night Western Mediterranean cruise, we encountered a pretty significant travel delay. Our flight was delayed three hours, then just as we went to push back from the gate, a passenger became ill, forcing the plane to return to the gate. Because of this, our flight crew timed out. This meant that instead of leaving for Barcelona on Wednesday night at 7:00 pm, our flight was delayed to Thursday morning at 11:00 am.
What happens now? You would think that our lovely airline would compensate us for a hotel stay. Nope. Not the case. We had two options: stay at the airport or go pay for a hotel on our own.
This also meant that we were going to miss our first night in Barcelona, Spain. We were going to have to eat the cost of a hotel, our rides to/from the airport, as well as lose our first night of our hotel stay which by that point was non-refundable.
Enter travel insurance.
If you've followed our blog or booked travel with CruiseNReview, you know how big of proponents we are of trip insurance. When traveling abroad, you are extremely exposed to all kinds of unexpected expenses ranging from travel delays and disruptions to medical emergencies. Trip insurance steps in to protect you for when these potentially expensive issues arise. We practice what we preach at CruiseNReview and carry travel insurance on any international trip or trips of significant expense.
Since we booked our policy through Allianz, trip delay was covered. Our total policy cost was $450 for a 10-day trip valued at over $10,000. Most trips are significantly cheaper but giving the duration, cost, and distance traveled, this was the most we had ever paid for trip insurance. I always purchase a policy independent of the providers I'm traveling with as these policies are often extremely limited to that vendors portion of the trip and don't typically cover other extraneous costs.
Knowing I had trip insurance made the decision to go to a hotel an easy one over sleeping in the airport. I also knew that we had some coverage for meals during the delay as well.
We booked a room online at the Hilton near the airport, bought some toiletries from the front desk since most of ours were still checked in our luggage on the plane, and got a good nights rest before flying the next day. I also contacted our hotel in Barcelona to inform them we were delayed and to hold our room until the following day.
I simply kept receipts for all of my expenses incurred and submitted them when I got back from vacation. You typically have 90 days from the end of your trip to file a claim. If you book your trip and policy with CruiseNReview, we will file it for you.
Here is a breakdown of the expenses I submitted:
Hilton DFW Airport (1 Night Stay) - $202.26
Uber Expenses (To/From DFW) - $52.12
Breakfast at DFW Airport - $21.12
Toiletries at Hotel $12.64
Non-Refundable Hotel Stay in Barcelona (1 Night Lost) - $326.44
Refunds depend on a variety of circumstances including your policy. Some are more robust than others. Luckily, I was nowhere near the limits of my policy so I figured I had a good chance at recouping my funds.
Within one week of submitting my claim, I was notified that my claim was approved and funds would be in my account with 1-3 business days. The next evening, $614.58 was deposited into my checking account.
Travel delays stink. Getting your money back for expenses incurred softens the blow. You can make the argument that the years I've spent buying travel insurance adds up to more than the $600 I got back, and you'd be right. However, I really don't buy the insurance for situations like what I described, I buy for the big expenses. I purchase a policy in case I have a medical emergency and have to get air lifted from a cruise ship and receive a $100,000 bill. That being said, I recouped the entire price of my policy plus some because I bought this protection.
You can read our other article on all the reasons to buy travel insurance by clicking here.
CruiseNReview is a travel insurance provider as a partner of Allianz. To get your travel insurance quote started, call or text us at (870) 273-5004 or email us at info@cruisenreview.com and mention you are interested in getting a quote for travel insurance.
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