A Horror Story (from campertrails.com)

Trip insurance is a modern travel necessity. Whether your choice is RV travel or regular travel, many times you will find yourself needing airplane tickets, vehicle rentals, overnight hotels and all manner of travel-related bookings. Nowadays, you can get trip insurance that will cover you for just about everything. You can get an affordable travel insurance policy that covers travel for the elderly, backpackers travel insurance, student travel insurance, and travel insurance for pre-existing conditions. You can even get trip-cancellation insurance. Lost baggage insurance? Don’t make me laugh!

OK, you say, but how much doestrip insurance cost and where do I get it? Well, before we get into that, I’d like to tell you a little story.

It was a clear, brisk, bright and cloudless day in February, and there I was barreling happily down the M11 motorway. I was on my way back to London to pick up my family after a successful business meeting near Cambridge. They had spent the morning sampling all the delights that London stores have to offer. They called it sampling. I called it shop until you drop. Different perspectives, I guess, but that’s a different story.

Anyway, England being England, vehicles travel on the left-hand side of the road. If you come from a country where you drive on the right, like I do, this requires a lot of concentration until you get used to it. Multi-lane motorways are not so demanding, but this was only my second day in a right-hand drive car (this all happened in my pre-RV days) and I was not yet able to drive on auto-pilot.

I had just passed the exit to Bishops Stortford at a brisk 75 mph when I saw a huge, seemingly solid wall of fog not more than twenty feet away. I live in a warmer climate and I had never ever seen – let alone experienced - anything like that before. I instinctively slammed on the brakes as hard as I could, but that did little to slow me down before I hit the fog wall. It really looked solid. Once inside, I couldn’t even see the engine hood, let alone the car in front of me. I still don’t know the proper technique for handling a situation like that, because the last thing I remember before waking up in a London hospital was a loud – very loud - crunching sound. I later learned that the car behind me, obviously not expecting my sudden stop, had sent me flying into the car in front. The result? A seven car pileup on the M11. It made the news, too.

Now this story has some good news and some bad news. And a life lesson as well. Here’s the good news - the rental car was fully insured, so luckily I didn’t have to pay anything, not even the excess. The bad news was that I, myself, wasn’t. Fortunately, I wasn’t really injured too badly, and neither was anyone else, but UK hospitals are not cheap for the uninsured. That was when I decided that I would never, ever, venture abroad without suitable trip insurance. 

At the time of my accident, before the advent of the Internet, getting low-cost, worldwide travel insurance was a bit of a hassle. That’s not an excuse, though. But nowadays, with the help of the Internet, it is easier than ever to find the travel insurance policy that’s just right for you. No matter what your needs are – US holiday travel insurance, over 65 travel insurance, trip cancellation insurance or cheap personal travel insurance, you can get free travel insurance quotes from a reputable company with just a a few clicks of your mouse. Better yet, you can compare quotes from various companies in one shot – how’s that for convenience? 

The way it works, you simply enter your travel insurance needs, some basic trip details, and 1,2,3, you’re done and you have a list of quotes you can choose from, together with special recommendations. You gotta love it. You don’t enter any personal details until you do the booking over a secure server, so you remain safe and spam-free.

Bodily Injury Coverage

Bodily injury liability is sold in standard increments that designate both how much coverage you have per person in an accident, with an additional limit per accident. For example, if you buy bodily injury worth $100,000/$300,000, each of the people you injured could be compensated $100,000, but only up to $300,000 per accident.

How much coverage you need is a function of what assets you have to protect. If you make $30,000 a year and rent your apartment, $50,000/$100,000 should suffice. But if you make more than $75,000 a year, own a house worth $150,000 and have $40,000 in mutual funds, you should consider at least $100,000/$300,000 of coverage.