The Best-Laid Plans...

Here's a post from Mary relating to our recent gallivantations (I'm looking to get my own word into Webster) around the world. We are home now and everything's fine. We had to cut the trip short and due to the changes and stuff along the way I fell behind on entries. I do have a bunch of articles left to post and will get them up over the next couple of weeks. So here's Mary.

As Mike mentioned in an earlier post, we had to come home from our round-the-world (RTW) trip early. 25 days early, to be exact, meaning our trip ended up being only 47 days long instead of 72. I had some recurring health issues starting in Hong Kong, and by the time we reached Australia, it became apparent I was going to have to go back to the US for treatment.

This meant canceling quite a few planned legs of the trip, including visits to Adelaide, Australia; Christchurch, New Zealand; Dubai; Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, Spain; and Paris and Disneyland Paris. When I figured out we were going to have to reroute, cancel and rebook dozens of reservations, it was absolutely overwhelming. Here's where it would have been so much easier if I'd used a travel agent to book everything - I could have made one call and let the agent do it.

Our recent experience was an interesting lesson in what happens when your well-thought-out travel plans go awry in a big way. Prior to our recent RTW trip, Mike and I have had some pretty amazing luck during our travels, considering we've traveled internationally about ten times in the past five years, usually for at least two weeks at a time. Until this trip we'd experienced absolutely no major glitches.

Before our RTW trip, we'd never had a big screw-up with a hotel or airline. Oh, I had made a few minor mistakes in the past (like booking a hotel stay on the wrong dates) but luckily those errors were all easily corrected and didn't cost us a thing. Well, that luck ran out on the RTW trip. If you've been reading this blog, you know I managed to make a mistake that caused us to miss our very first flight of the trip. That cost us quite a bit, because we had to buy a walk-up airfare at the airport. And unfortunately, stupidity is not covered by travel insurance.

Speaking of travel insurance, here's how our situation played out. Last fall, I considered buying full travel insurance coverage, meaning trip cancellation/interruption insurance and medical coverage. I quickly discovered that it was difficult to get a policy to cover a 72-day trip. The few policies I found (through insuremytrip.com) were also wildly expensive. So I sat down and thought about what I really needed.

First I thought about what would happen if we suddenly had to cancel our trip or cut it short, which is what trip cancellation/interruption insurance covers. Most of our hotel reservations would be refundable up until just a few days prior to check-in, because I had deliberately booked rates that allowed changes and cancellations. In fact, only the two stays we had booked for vineyard cottages in the Barossa Valley and Marlborough wine regions would not be fully refundable. So it wasn't likely that we'd be in danger of losing much money on hotel deposits. (Now, if we'd been traveling on a vacation package or a cruise, trip cancellation insurance would have been critical, because you pay for those upfront, and if you have to cancel or change your plans at the last minute, you just lose all that money, unless you have insurance.)

Also, unlike the typical discounted round-trip airfare, which is quite inflexible, RTW air tickets are designed for relative flexibility. (That's why they are very popular with college kids backpacking around the world -- in the much cheaper Coach version, of course.) I realized that if we needed to change our flights, we'd only have to pay a relatively small change penalty, there would be no last-minute fare penalty, and getting seats should be no problem. Thus, trip cancellation/interruption insurance didn't seem really critical.

That left me with the issue of medical coverage. We are members of MedjetAssist, which is a program that provides medical evacuation by private jet from anywhere in the world if you require hospitalization. That is much better than standard travel medical insurance, which will only pay for evacuation if the insurance company deems it necessary. With Medjet, if you're in the hospital and you want to go home, they will transport you, as long as you're stable enough to fly. Medjet is not, strictly speaking, insurance - it's a private program for which you pay an annual fee of a few hundred dollars.

So we didn't need medical evacuation insurance. That left travel medical insurance - in other words, coverage for medical care if one of us should have an illness or accident during the trip. I double-checked our regular medical insurance and determined that it would only cover limited emergency care outside the US. If we sprained an ankle or got the flu, that wouldn't be covered. So for $370 I ended up buying a two-month travel medical policy that would cover the dates we'd actually be outside the US. It covered up to $250,000 of medical expenses, with a $250 deductible.

As it turned out, I wasn't hospitalized and I could just barely manage the long-haul flights necessary to get home. (Here's where being in First Class was a complete godsend, because I could lie down during the flights.) Changing our flights was fairly painless, though because it was a RTW ticket, we had to come home from Sydney the long way around. It would have been a lot faster to fly straight to Los Angeles, but that would have meant doubling back across the Pacific, which is not allowed by the RTW ticket rules. So we had to go home via Bangkok and London. Fortunately I was well enough to manage it. And frankly, if I had been much worse off, I probably would have been in a hospital bed, in which case we'd have used Medjet to get me home.

While I'm sad about missing the other planned stops on our trip, at least I'm not upset about the cost of our plane tickets. The very first leg of our trip, if purchased separately, would have cost more than the entire price of our RTW tickets, so we were already ahead of the game at the beginning. Yes, it would have been nice to get even more value from the tickets, but that's life. We had to pay a reissue fee of about $300 to change our ticket, but that wasn't too bad, all things considered.

Our travel medical policy should pay for the over $1400 in medical expenses I incurred during our trip, less the $250 deductible. So assuming that happens, it was worth buying.

We lost half the cost of one of the vineyard cottages and the full cost of the other - a total of about $1000. We were able to cancel all of our other hotel reservations in time to avoid penalties. We also lost some prepaid European train fares amounting to about $700. In hindsight, I made two mistakes with the train tickets. First, on such a long trip I should not have bought nonrefundable tickets. (They were nearly half the price of the flexible tickets, and I succumbed to temptation.) Second, it really wasn't necessary to buy those tickets so far in advance. Since we were traveling in the off-season, I could have waited to buy the tickets in Spain and France. Yes, it would have been a little more trouble and the tickets would have cost a bit more at the last minute, but I would have had a lot more flexibility. Live and learn.

If I had purchased trip interruption insurance, it's possible that, with a doctor's note, I could have been reimbursed the approximately $2000 we were out for air ticket change fees, lost accommodation deposits and nonrefundable train tickets, but after paying the high cost of the insurance (which as I recall was about $900 for such a long trip) and the deductible (which I think would have been about $250), I wouldn't have been all that much ahead.

In any case, I'm glad to be home and glad to be feeling much better!