Karen is right. We purchased a CSA Advantage policy.

Ngaire asked me to post about what we had purchased and why. Now keep in mind that our goals for insuring the next world cruise were a little different than the subject that started this discussion, being the loss of vacation by Diamond cruisers. We had to purchase this policy over the phone with www.insuremytrip.com because purchasing online had a limit of $100,000 total trip cost, or $50,000pp. The deciding factor in favor of this policy was the “return of premium waiver.” This is one of those things, like pre-existing condition waivers and financial default, that is only available if you purchase within 14 days of initial trip deposit, but it means that if we cancel for any reason, covered or not, that we can apply for the cancellation of the policy and the return of the premium paid for it. This was the only policy we found with this feature and CSA only offers it on the Advantage policy not their standard Silver and Gold policies (though it appears you can purchase the return of premium waiver as an add-on to some of their WebDirect policies). Since we were paying the 20% deposit and purchasing the policy so far in advance and the price of the insurance alone was in the $8000-$10,000 range, we felt that we needed to be able to recover the price of the policy as well should this trip not happen for any reason. However, I should note there are always compromises, I have elderly grandparents and parents not in the best of health and while RSSC’s policy would have covered our canceling the trip on account of their health with no pre-existing conditions exclusions, the CSA Advantage policy will not. It will only waive pre-existing condition exclusions for travelers. So, we will have to try to judge their conditions before we enter the penalty phase. It is likely that if the condition of one of them should deteriorate to the point that we needed to be with them, it would be from a condition that they have now and that would not be covered under the insurance policy we bought. (In fact, my reading of the policy is that CSA would not have to cover the Diamond cancellation situation either.)

Claudia is right that Betty (graywolf) posted that she had insured her WC through CSA as well. Claudia is also so right that no matter how much research you do before you purchase, you cannot know what you have until you try to use it. So, we too will be hoping that Betty will keep LCT updated as her claims shake out over the coming months.

Dougburns is, I believe though, in error. (Sorry, Doug!) Insurance purchased through RSSC (Berkely Care) will not cover the loss of a trip due to financial default of RSSC. And, in our case with the WC it would only cover up $50,000 and anything over would be paid in future cruise credits which would certainly preclude insuring the entire cost and would minimize the value of the policy for the 9% price tag.

Trip insurance is not cheap, there are a wide range of policies, people have different needs for different times and it is not an easy or quick task to make the right decision, and frankly for all the fine print you still do not know what you bought until you try to file a claim and that is when you find out all the rules and regs you really needed to know to judge the best policy for you anyway. There are also the issues of wiggle room, gray areas and good faith with both travel providers and insurance providers. These things all factor in I think to the area of personal responsibility. It is perhaps impossible to ever do anything but self-insure in the end, wittingly or not, because you cannot assess all the risks as Bill suggests. The average vacationer could not have known the odds of Radisson losing Diamond this summer. Nowhere on their website or in their brochures have I seen RSSC advertise the fact that they did not own Diamond or what the terms of their lease are. Whereas RSSC did know the odds of this happening, the average vacationer could not have known nor calculated their risks in the absence of all the necessary information. It has been my limited experience that all trips would be essentially the same, that the traveler is ultimately the one assuming all the risks no matter the variables of each vacation, or their propensity for personal responsibility.

I guess this has run on far too long, but I did promise Ngaire I would post about our insurance research. I had actually had the insure vs. self-insure discussion on the phone with her some weeks ago as we were working on booking our upcoming cruises, so I can understand why I came to her mind when she read this thread. Sorry for going on so long and hope this helps some.
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