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Choosing Travel Insurance
The ad for
Group Medical Services says, "Travel Insurance for Snowbirds is our claim to fame!"
Since this is one of our major costs of travel, we did a lot of homework before leaving on our current 5-month trip.
Most Canadians are aware that our government health plans will not cover medical expenses outside of our province over and above what the cost for the same services would be at home.
In most cases, there is a huge difference. In fact, a hospital stay in a foreign county, including the United States, without travel insurance coverage can often drain a person's life savings.
As we age, this extended health insurance gets more expensive, but we would not travel without it.
We did the research. Here are our findings
We checked a lot of different options and got a wide range of quotes, but ended up choosing Group Medical Services (GMS).
Here are the reasons:
- 2 million coverage vs some others which offer only 1 million
- 24-hour travel assistance
- direct billing for any claims instead of having to pay ourselves and then make the claim
- friendly very personable phone staff, no time spent on hold, no extra buttons to push to speak to the right department. (Almost unheard of these days.)
- on-line application was simple and straight-forward
- the best rates! (substantial savings)
As you may know, after age 55 it becomes a little more expensive to get travel insurance, depending on your medical history.
In our case, we're both over 55 (just) and don't have any health conditions that affect the rate. With this company we're paying $2.31 each per day for full coverage. We had the option to reduce that even further to $2.10 per day with a $250.00 deductible.
This beat all the other quotes we got.
For example the daily rate with CAA (who we've used in the past) was $3.27.
We also purchased the annual 30-day multiple-trip plan which cost very little extra when combined with this but will cover us for any other trips we may take take later in 2008 (up to 30 days each trip). The cost for this was $83.00 per person vs the same plan with CAA at $108.00.
With any insurance, the most important thing is always how well they handle a claim. Let's hope we don't have to find out first-hand, but just in case, we did an extensive Internet search for customer claims service reviews and found not one negative report on GMS.
Based in Saskatchewan, the company has been providing health insurance services since 1949, and only recently (since 2003) have extended their services into other Canadian provinces.
If you're a Canadian shopping for extended travel insurance I highly recommend that you check them out. Visit
www.gms.ca or call 1-800-667-3699.
Oh, and I must say that the 2 girls (Quinn and Tara) who I spoke with when I called were knowledgeable, extremely helpful and just absolutely wonderful to deal with.
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