6 Reasons Why Travel Insurance Is A Must-Have For Travel With Kids
It’s travelling season with kids once again! It is either you are on holiday now, or planning for one in the coming June. While you have your destination set, tickets and flight booked, have you missed out an important part of your family holiday planning? Yes! It is a travel insurance! Let me tell you why it is so important, especially when you are travelling with kids:
1. In case you need to cancel your trip
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Family trips are usually planned well in advance, with everyone’s schedules having to align. What happens if your kids, as children often do, fall ill just before you’re due to leave? Perhaps you’d wish to postpone or even cancel your trip, but then what about your flights? Your hotel? Your tour?
Having travel insurance means that some of these cancellations/postponements can be covered by your insurer. For a cancelled trip, your insurance plan should cover transport and accommodation costs that you have already paid or committed to paying and cannot get refunded for by your airline/hotel/travel agent. For a postponement, usual coverage includes the admin fees, and extra transport/accommodation costs incurred. The amount you are covered for would differ from plan to plan, and sometimes depends on the reason for your trip being cancelled/postponed.
2. In case you get stuck at the airport and your bags don’t turn up on time
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Long travel delays, missed connections and baggage issues are commonplace when travelling, especially on long haul flights or when you have to switch between different modes of public transportation. Such situations are inconvenient for any traveller and the stress is even worse when one has one or two (often cranky) children in tow.
Fortunately, with travel insurance coverage, if you are delayed or cannot find alternative transport for upwards of 6 hours, you will receive cash benefits. The same goes if your bags are delayed for 6 hours or more.
With this in mind, you can do whatever you need to help make the delay less stressful for your kids (and ultimately for you!), whether that’s bribing them with donuts, buying them a book to read while waiting, or simply topping up your dwindling diaper supply.
3. In case you get pickpocketed or robbed
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No matter how careful we are, pickpockets can strike at any time. Parents with kids and teenage travellers are easy targets, as they can be distracted (parents by young children; teenagers by their phones) and not constantly on alert.
With travel insurance, in the event you are robbed, all is not lost. For cash or items stolen, after lodging a report with the local police, your travel insurer will replace, repair or provide a cash equivalent for the lost items up to the limit of your plan.
4. In case things get too dangerous
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Say you and your family were enjoying the sights in Paris or Auckland, when suddenly a riot erupts or an earthquake strikes. When travelling with your family, safety naturally becomes your top priority. If it seems unsafe to stay where you are, the only solution is for you to shorten your trip and come home, meaning to the rest of your trip.
In cases like this, not only will your travel insurance pay for the transport and accommodation costs that you can’t get refunded for, it will also pay for your transport fares back home to Singapore. So you won’t have to worry about losing all your deposits or waiting for seats on cheaper flights home.
5. In case your kids need medical attention or an accident occurs
Often, if you fall ill overseas, you’d wait until you’re back home in Singapore to see your local GP. Perhaps you’d buy over-the-counter lozenges or flu medicines, but rarely would you venture into a foreign clinic.
With kids however, it’s different. Especially with young children, fevers and flus are scary to wait out and you never know when it might take a turn for the worst. As a parent, you wouldn’t want to take any chances, and would want to take your child to a GP as soon as possible.
When such an unhappy event occurs, travel insurance is a godsend that will cover some, if not all, medical expenses. If your child has pre-existing conditions, like asthma – common in Singaporean kids – then having a travel insurance that covers medical expenses due to pre-existing conditions is even more important in case they suffer an attack while you’re on your travels.
Should (touch wood!) your child suffer any accident while overseas, the sum assured from your travel insurance serves as some form of financial aid. If you the parent suffers some kind of accident, then this payout is also important for you to have to help tide over your expenses while you recover, as you’ll still have kids depending on you.
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Travel insurance will also come to your aid in case you or your kids need emergency medical evacuations. While overseas, if you’re in a life-threatening condition due to injury or illness, and our assistance company believes it to be medically necessary, your insurance coverage will take care of the costs and arrangements to move you to the nearest medical facility for treatment. If you need to recuperate or received continued treatment afterwards, your coverage will also take care of moving you back to Singapore.
6. In case your kids break something or injure someone
While it’s not likely that your child would cause someone harm serious enough to result in legal action, which parent hasn’t experienced the heart-stopping horror of seeing their child almost knock over an expensive, break-able item?
Now imagine you’re in a museum and one of your kids accidentally bumps into an authentic, priceless Ming vase. It won’t take long for said museum to bring legal action to cover their loss.
Little known to many people, travel insurance covers you if you are legally responsible for accidentally injuring someone or damaging someone’s property while overseas, up to the cap provided in your chosen plan. If you have particularly accident-prone or curious children, you’ll be thankful for this coverage, especially when that museum calls to collect.
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We want the overseas trips with our kids to be as fun and memorable as possible. However, sometimes unforeseen events like expensive emergency bills or loss of valuables could cripple our trips. Travel insurance offers protection against these mishaps and coverage on some financial losses. It is thus wiser, never to travel without it.
