Travel insurance: what it covers and when you need it

Travel insurance covers two very different things, and it helps to separate them. One is trip protection — the money you’ve prepaid for a trip, refunded if a covered reason forces you to cancel or cut it short. The other is travel medical — your emergency care and evacuation if you get sick or hurt while you’re away. Many plans bundle both, but they solve different problems.

For anyone on Medicare, the medical side is the one that really matters. Original Medicare covers little to nothing outside the United States, so a trip abroad is exactly where a retiree can get caught without coverage — which is where this section starts.

Trip protection vs. travel medical

Trip protection is about money. If you’ve prepaid for flights, a cruise, or a tour and a covered event keeps you from going, trip cancellation and interruption coverage reimburses what you can’t recover. Travel medical is about care. It pays for emergency treatment and, just as important, emergency evacuation while you’re traveling — the part that can run into six figures if you need an air ambulance from a remote place. A bundled plan does both; a standalone travel medical plan focuses on the care.

Why it matters more on Medicare

Most working-age travelers have a health plan that offers at least some out-of-network or emergency coverage abroad. Medicare generally doesn’t. Original Medicare pays for care outside the country only in a few narrow situations, and even a Medigap plan’s foreign-emergency benefit is capped. That gap is the reason travel medical coverage is worth understanding before you book.