So we love our current health insurance plan with Anthem BlueCross. However, it provides ZERO coverage when we’re outside of the US. Therefore, I started looking for a travel insurance policy. Everywhere I looked I kept hearing fantastic things about World Nomads and if I didn’t have a ridiculous tendancy to over-research things, I probably would have signed up with them on the spot. However, not only did I want to be comprehensive, but also my grandfather has an affiliate deal with Travel Guard, so I thought I should at least give them a chance too.

Anyways, I took all the providers I could find and put all the plans relevant to someone taking a >6 month international trip in one spreadsheet here. Travel Guard was instantly out due to their $5/day surcharge for trips longer than 30 days. Most of the other providers were either too expensive or were only providing medical coverage and none of the extras (e.g. flight cancellation or delays, lost luggage) that a complete travel insurance policy would include.

Not surprising, I ended up deciding that World Nomads was the best policy. I made this decision for the following reasons:

• Everywhere I turned (blogs, books, travel websites) there was another person saying that World Nomads is THE BEST travel insurance company out there.
• Despite that their policies are for a maximum of 6-months, they can be easily extended online.
• You can file any claims with them from their website instead of having to use fax or mail.
• They cover quite a few adventure activities (see full list here).
• They have a beautiful website… Hey, I’m a geek, and when a company gets web design / web 2.0, it makes them that much more attractive to me.

So if you need a travel insurance policy, I would highly recommend you checking out World Nomads.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Pre-Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.