For the just cancelled Tahiti trip I insured it for $500 pp. I knew if the whole thing needed to be scrapped I had up to 7 days before hand where there would only be a small loss.
BUT. I picked a policy which gave 250K medical care/evacuation coverage PP as well as trip extension coverage of $125 pp/day for up to 10 days. IF were were to get stuck because of a positive COVID test and couldn’t return to the US the policy would have covered the better part of an extended hotel stay plus some meals etc.
That policy cost $113. Which I will now lose but it was so worth the peace of mind.
I found an online broker who spent 50 minutes talking me thru details and intricacies and was NOT overselling anything. Don’t think I can put the link here…so anyone interested PM me.
We are afraid of getting stuck there if we should test positive. We had things left on our domestic bucket list so this seems to be a good time to get those checked off.
Son came back from Cabo via SWA today. He took the proctored CUE Health COVID test, it came back negative. It is an FDA approved test for re-entry to the USA. As a precaution, he also took the antigen test offered by the hotel (Also negative)
At the SWA check-in in Cabo they refused to honor the CUE test. Had never heard of it. So good thing he had the antigen one in place.
Being the inquisitive type…he wandered over to the AA counter and asked if they accept the CUE test. Well, yes. of course they do and they seem quite a few more these days.
Then he asked the SWA gate agent why there was a problem. The agent guessed that since the person at check-in was unfamiliar they simply said no.
He called CUE and was told they had not heard of any other problems of this sort.
I stopped by the local airport and spoke with two SWA reps at the check in counter. One was very interested and tried to make sense. He gave up and called his supervisor. Her response ‘we don’t fly to Cabo’. Um, dear lord, woman, I sure hope you are wrong because my son just boarded one of your airplanes in Cabo about an hour ago!! Well, ‘we don’t fly to/from Cabo directly from THIS airport’. The rest of the conversation can be summarized as ‘I don’t know, I don’t care, I’m not going to inquire and good bye’.
We have a trip to KW planned for April. I took out trip insurance. With regard to Covid, it covers only if any one of our party (or close relatives) become sick with covid and can’t travel. At this point, I no longer see rising covid numbers in the area we are traveling to as a reason we would cancel (renting a house and almost everything there can be done outdoors).
I am once again toying with the idea of scheduling our twice postponed/cancelled Amsterdam trip and hoping to hit it in one of the “between variant” lulls in covid activity. Thinking beginning of June. Hard to know the timing, as I’ve been fantastically wrong for the past two years, but my tolerance for postponing joy is rapidly declining, so we may just do it regardless of the state of the world.
I’m still hoping for a trip to Japan this spring or summer. I figure if we do it we’ll make the decision at the last minute. I haven’t seen my kid who is there since January 2020 and I loved our last Japan trip which was 17 years ago.
I just booked my flight to Italy for July. It’s with a major airline, so with no change fee I will be able to rebook. I am not buying insurance for it.
As one of our New Year’s “looking forward” questions we did in our family, the question was posed, “Will you travel to a new (to you) country in 2022?” I said yes, therefore, I plan to see that I’m right.
We’re just not sure where yet… USVI will be new to us, but it’s not a new country, of course. We’ll see how the pandemic and travel go. Iceland, Germany, French Polynesia, and various countries in Africa are all in the running pending time, finances, and Covid.
A follow-up to the stories I linked to a few days ago:
The tests themselves may be defective. Hopefully, they aren’t used anywhere else, especially for departing passengers who need to be tested in order to board flights to go to other countries.
I will probably start my business trips to Florida in late March or April and then stay several days to get a little vacation out of it. DH and I want to fly to LA in May and do a coastal road trip to Napa valley and fly home from SF. However, we will wait to the end of January to see the virus status before we book anything. I expect here in NY, it will be declining but don’t want to go anywhere where it is surging. I think both Florida and California will be declining by the time I go. I hope.
We really wanted to go to Portugal or Banff in May (two 2020 canceled vacations) but I don’t want to deal with the testing issue. I have friends who have traveled overseas and had no issue but they did say, it put a bit of stress to find a place to get it done and hope they didn’t test positive. It would just cause me too much stress to enjoy the trip. I do miss traveling though.
We had a trip to HI the week that NYC officially shut down and then we had a trip to Cancun when Omicron hit. For both of those trips we debated whether we should go right up to when we were leaving. We were very glad that we went. We took as much precaution as we could. We didn’t eat indoor (ate when there were fewer people), we wore good masks while at the airport and waited at low density lounges.
I think at some point we will all need to figure out how to have some normalcy in our lives. What are some risks worth taking and how to mitigate as much risk as possible.
As I mentioned before, we are planning a 2 weeks family vacation to Italy. We are renting a villa with a pool. If the Covid situation is good, we will do wine tasting and eat out more, if things are bad then we will eat in and do more outdoor activities.