Do You Actually Need Cruise Travel Insurance?

What's important to understand at the onset is what travel insurance actually pays for and what cancellation does not mean.

A travel insurance policy is a contract that pays for specific losses after specific events.

And it's not just some magic refund button that you click if you have a bad vacation or you're on a cruise and you missed the flight because you flew in the same day and ooh, I now should be reimbursed for that.

And most of the anger that people tend to have toward insurance policies comes from that gap and that misunderstanding.

Trip cancellation is the one that tends to confuse people the most because people hear the word cancellation and they just assume that it means for any reason.

It does not.

This is very important.

Standard policies have a list of covered reasons, and it's usually things like a very serious illness, a major injury, or a death in the immediate family.

A work conflict, a breakup, a I have claustrophobia and I don't want to be in an interior stateroom, the weather looks bad.

Those are not on the list.

Now there is an add-on for that.

It's usually called CFAR or cancel for any reason coverage.

And it does exactly what it says.

But of course there are a lot of caveats and loopholes and restrictions.

And you do typically have to buy it within just days of your first trip payment.

It adds real money to your premium.

These obviously don't come cheap, which is why most people don't buy them.

And it doesn't even always reimburse you in full.

Typically it reimburses somewhere between 50 and 75%, not the whole thing.

And you even have to cancel before a deadline that's written in the contract hits.

So it is a legit product, it's just not this magical safety net that a lot of people envision.