WHY PURCHASE TRAVEL INSURANCE?
Unless you feel that your cruise vacation investment is something you can lose and not have it be of any consequence to you financially, you may want to invest a little time to find out just how much you could expect to get back if you were NOT insured, and found yourself having to cancel or interrupt a trip for any number of reasons. Family emergency, medical reason, family illness, illness of a traveling companion. There are a lot of reasons why someone might need to cancel or interrupt a trip, and unless you have adequate insurance coverage, you may end up seeing some or even all of your investment go up in smoke because it wasn't covered adequately.
There are many companies offering travel insurance these days. Before you put out any money to buy insurance, though, you might want to do some research into trip interruption and cancellation insurance first. Then you can compare the benefits of various providers and make an informed decision regarding how to best protect your cruise/vacation investment.
Check out what CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) has as it's #1 Travel Tip. CLIA is the "official trade organization of the cruise industry". It is composed of member cruise lines that represent 95% of the cruise capacity marketed from North America. To see more about CLIA, visit our CLIA information page.
It's almost impossible to find a major cruise line that doesn't offer its own brand of travel protection. And most of them offer more than one version of their coverage. The wise buyer looks at the details of each plan and chooses the one that is most suited for their needs. A lot of factors go into selecting the right policy, whether it's one from the cruise line, or one of the many independent insurance providers in today's market.
One really good source of information on independent providers is InsureMyTrip.com, where you can plug in your specific travel information and then compare coverages and rates across several providers at one time. However, we need to warn you that sometimes the rate information provided may not be 100% correct, since providers can sometimes change rates and not notify InsureMyTrip.com in a timely manner. Be sure to check out InsureMyTrip.com's FAQ page. It has some excellent information on the travel insurance as it applies to all of the providers.
Here is what some of the world's leading cruise lines have to say about insurance: