When you’re looking at travel medical insurance policies, make sure your policy covers both “emergency medical evacuation” and “repatriation of remains.” If things are bad enough to require either one, you (or your survivors) will be glad you took the time to get it right beforehand.
Contact your auto and medical insurance companies to ensure they know you’re traveling overseas. Verify the types and amounts of insurance coverage you have for your destination.
Critically assess what you will be doing on your vacation or where you will be living. Even if you’re not doing anything dangerous, you will probably need to get additional medical insurance you can use while traveling abroad. Take the time to consider all of the possibilities. Make sure you have the proper medical coverage for possible injuries from your activities, food poisoning, car accidents, and even natural disasters in some places.
Should something happen and you are without the right insurance coverage, the financial responsibility will be in your hands. To ease that potential burden, expect to pay between $15 and $60 per month for a traveler’s medical policy. There are also companies offering international medical evacuation policies to get you home in addition to health care plans.
If you purchase any type of insurance coverage, make sure your family is aware and has a copy of those documents.
If you regularly work internationally in a potentially targeted industry, such as the non-profit sector or as a defense contractor, kidnap insurance is worth considering. Kidnap insurance policies offer reimbursement of the ransom money in the event of a kidnapping, as well as a number of other reimbursable expenses. Also, most insurers, regardless of the policy limit, will pay unlimited fees and expenses towards “crisis response services.”
So…how successful is a crisis response team in getting people back? With a professional team in place, the victim was released safely in 90% of cases.
