Travel Insurance is one of those unfortunate realities of travel life, something that nobody wants to pay for, nobody wants to use, and yet nobody wants to leave home without it! For good reason too…
I’ll cover below who we picked, how we picked them and how our total insurance picture looks for full time travel.
We are from Australia, but most travellers from different parts of the world face the same issues. While you are travelling, if everything goes to poo, you don’t want to be stuck with an extreme bill for things like hospitals, major travel disruption costs etc. I’m sure you’ve all seen the marketing of the major travel insurance companies by the time you read this post.
We tend to self insure for small things, but want insurance for the really big things. Like, we are ok to pay to go and see a Dr for a routine checkup if required, or if we miss a $200 flight it’s no big deal, but we certainly don’t want to be up for $200,000 for a large hospital bill in the US or a repatriation medical flight from Asia.
I (Dan) am a researcher to the Nth degree, and even I got confused when looking at the different travel insurance options. I had to create a spreadsheet to try and compare the different costs and benefits.
So who did we pick, how did we pick them and how does our Insurance situation work? And how much does it cost?
– For medical and general travel including liability, we picked SafetyWing, a US based company,
– For Hire (rental) car insurance, we decided to stick with the hire car provider offering, as it was cheaper than through the car company themselves, in this case we found DiscoverCars usually had the best prices.
– For Valuable electronics, cameras and laptops, we use Aon Photographers insurance, in Australia.
In this way, we are covered for most big things that could go wrong, we save a fair bit of money, and for small things we generally just deal with it.
We have only had to claim once on these insurances yet, (touch wood it stays that way) but they all have positive reviews from people.
Medical and general travel including liability:
SafetyWing is a Nomad specific travel insurance. Normal travel insurance requires you to take out the policy before you leave your home country, and they usually only allow a certain time period to be insured (6 months is common) and they cost a mint. Although aimed at digital nomads, anyone travelling anywhere in the world for any amount of time can take out a policy.
We stumbled upon SafetyWing when searching the internet, conveniently around the same time as our old insurance was expiring. It was one of the only policies that allows you to start and stop it as you want, month by month, or have it for a specific time period. It doesn’t require you to be in your home country when you start the policy. Importantly for us, it also covers non-extreme sports such as skiing and snowboarding, and even cruises are included in the normal monthly price. (These are both normally added extras that cost heaps!)
I won’t go over the specifics of the policy, but it’s one size fits all, covers the majority of our use cases and it’s very affordable. Two children are even free with a paying adult. Please have a look at their website yourself to check if it is suitable for you. It also includes liability insurance for activities, so if you accidentally injure someone else, you are covered up to $250,000.
To keep the costs down for the rest of the world, they do have a US loading as the health care there is so expensive. We still found it way, way cheaper than any other alternatives and we highly recommend this insurance.
Car Hire Insurance
We hire a lot of rental cars, in fact we have one for the vast majority of our travels, hired from different cities and countries for weeks or months at a time. We usually get the Full Coverage option from DiscoverCars.com, I don’t want to sound like an advertisement here, but basically it’s just reasonably priced full (comprehensive) cover. It can add to the price a bit, but we didn’t find any other real alternatives.
Aon Photographers insurance
This is a little known policy, sold via a broker in Australia, and I’ve held this policy for many years, as it covers all of my expensive photography gear, laptops, drones and phones. I’ve had to claim on this policy twice, once for a drone and once for a fallen over camera, and both times the company has been easy to deal with and paid out promptly. My premiums have increased only in line with inflation in this period of time. We found when looking for travel insurance, that most policies only cover valuables in very specific cases, and only up to small amounts, certainly nothing like the value of our gear in a total loss situation.
These are the policies we personally use and chose in order to feel comfortable while travelling. We hope to never make a claim, but at the same time, we feel much better about anything potentially happening with these companies at our backs.
Check them out for yourself, hopefully this has helped out, especially SafetyWing, because affordable long term, no fixed duration travel insurance was impossible to find before these guys came to be.
Thanks for stopping by! I hope that helps you understand Insurance for travelling internationally around the World, whether it be short holiday trips, longer holiday adventures or your on a long term travel life or a digital nomad. If you enjoyed this blog or found it useful, please feel free to click on any of the ads on the page, it doesn’t cost you anything, but it does help us see a little money to cover the hosting costs of the website.
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If you’re looking for more helpful information for international trips, you can check out our other blogs such as E-sims and Location Guides. & Don’t forget to check out our YouTube Channel for our Vlogs and other helpful information!
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