Student travel can come with risks. Travel insurance benefits the students, parents and schools when traveling overseas and experiencing emergencies.
Travel Insurance Benefits in Case of Emergency
Travel provides students an extraordinary opportunity for learning about the world and themselves. It's often a once in a lifetime chance for the student. While these locations are full of rich culture and amazing opportunities, travel to any location can be risky. Weather, political instability, terrorism, and other factors can cause these experiences to be interrupted or cancelled. These possibilities leave the student and, in some cases, the institution at risk for losing the travel investment needed to provide these experiences.
Travel insurance for academic experiences, whether study abroad or domestic, can help protect trip costs if something occurs that ends a trip unexpectedly.
Trip Cancellation
As students and teachers prepare for trips, an untold number of things can go wrong. Most often, this tends to be the traveler or a family member becoming ill or hospitalized, or a natural disasters that has made a location uninhabitable.
Trip cancellation benefits provide coverage for reimbursing the insured for pre-paid and non-refundable costs. Further supplementing this with optional Cancel for Any Reason coverage allows a traveler to back out of a trip up to two days before departure for any conceivable reason, as long as they are eligible and the coverage is available in their state. Trip cancellation, when for a covered reason, should cover all of the pre-paid and non-refundable trip costs, whereas Cancel For Any Reason is an optional coverage that will likely cover less than 100 percent of those costs.
Trip Interruption
Family emergencies, civil, or political unrest can potentially end a trip earlier than originally planned. Trip interruption coverage provides benefits when a traveler is forced to cut their trip short due to unforeseen covered emergencies. This will help cover the cost of traveling back home and reimbursing for the parts of the trip that have not yet occurred. Much like cancellation, Interruption for Any Reason coverage is also available. This will allow the traveler to end their trip early for reasons not listed on their travel insurance plan - as long as they are at least 48 hours into their trip. This optional benefit also has specific state eligibilities that should be considered and reimbursement will be a percentage of the non-refundable travel expenses.
Medical Emergency and Non-Medical Evacuation
If a traveler has become injured or ill and in need of transport back to their home region, emergency medical evacuation benefits can cover these costs. Being evacuated out of their host country can be one of the biggest expenses a traveler experiences. Many US based health insurance plans will not cover these costs when abroad. Be sure to encourage your travelers to understand healthcare limitations before purchasing a travel insurance plan. It may be the difference between a large financial burden and a fully covered cost with someone else coordinating the transport. This also holds true when political unrest occurs and the students need to be evacuated. Be sure to read the details of the plan as the benefits, especially non-medical emergency evacuation, may not be available in your state.
