Since the pandemic hit in the beginning of 2020, we’ve spent a lot of time booking, changing and rebooking travel accommodations for many of our clients. For some reason, there are still clients who seem to think that they’ll always get a refund on their travels when changes need to be made. Even if they don’t purchase travel insurance, they’re still expecting some form of reimbursement.
We recently had two huge custom FIT reservations that wanted to cancel their preplanned trips. Since it was less than 30 days before their departure, they would have lost a lot of money if they just outright canceled the trip. Fortunately, I was able to secure all of their funds so they didn’t lose any money by my moving the dates over for them vs. outright canceling. I did this without charging them any additional fees. I also did this without charging them the potentially higher rates for their new travel dates.
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Every time I do this for a client I always think – why should my team and I be doing all of this work over and over again without charging any new fees when it was the client’s decision not to travel due to COVID? This is especially frustrating when there aren’t any restrictions where they’re traveling to and they’ve already been fully vaccinated.
When we do offer our travel insurance options to clients, I would say about 90 percent immediately decline the insurance. The top reasons are 1. they think it’s a waste of money, 2. it’s not cheap to purchase, and 3. they feel nothing will happen to them before or during their travels. While it can be expensive depending on the amount of their trip, their age, which policy they choose, etc., clients must realize the importance of purchasing travel insurance. Especially these days!
Everyone has to pay for car insurance because you never know what will happen. Other examples of common insurance types people regularly purchase include home insurance, health insurance, renters insurance and even pet insurance. So why not purchase travel insurance to cover the unexpected, too?
We recently decided it would be beneficial to simply offer more insurance coverage options to our list of services to fully accommodate our variety of clients. We always do our best to offer our clients a wide range of coverages to protect them when they’re traveling, and since there are new travel insurance options now available, we’ve added these new options to our services.
Travel Insured is our preferred partner as they offer insurance benefits, like covering bed rest for quarantine. As a travel agent, you should understand how to choose the best policy and options for your clients. This is especially important due to all of the pandemic-related problems that are still happening as of today.
