Travel Insurance, good idea or not?

The jury is still out on this one. I have never in my life bought travel insurance on a domestic airline ticket. Mainly because the price of most airfares seem pretty reasonable and it seems silly to spend an extra 25 bucks or so on a ticket that you're trying to skimp on. So why a couple of months ago I bought travel insurance on an airline ticket from Tallahassee to Nashville, I really can't say. I think mostly it was due to the fact that the ticket cost me almost $500. Yeah. Traveling anywhere from Tallahassee sucks. But I still wouldn't want to live anywhere else, so that's that. I bought my ticket and pretty much ignored the email that came along with it from Access America (my new corporate BFF or enemy- verdict to be determined in 7-14 days).

Then, the rains came. And Nashville and the Grand Opryland Hotel were flooded and suddenly the RWA (Romance Writers of America) conference I was scheduled to attend there in late July was cancelled. I waited, along with a couple thousand other writers to see where the conference would be moved to. Orlando! Wow. Okay. My second home town (I grew up in Melbourne). I cringed (just a bit) when I heard that the conference would be held at the Swan and Dolphin Hotel at Disney World (not that it's not a lovely hotel and conference center) but as a native Floridian, I tend to get tired when all people associate Florida with is Mickey Mouse. But hey, the rat has been good to Florida tourism (as opposed to say, BP oil) so I'm not harping on Mickey and his friends. The hotel is lovely, the conference will be awesome and as long as a hurricane doesn't come along, we'll be in business:) It's a bit early in Hurricane season, so we should be fine. Okay, back to the travel insurance. Now that the conference will be in Orlando, I don't need an airline ticket. I can drive to Orlando faster than it takes to get through airport security. So I go into my saved email and find the Access America post and actually start to read my policy. And somewhere between the pages I begin to think that I have pretty solid grounds to get all my money back and believe me, an extra $500 sounds pretty good to me right now. So I put in my claim, forward all the information they ask for and wait my 7 days to see if I'm approved. I even spoke to a very helpful agent on the phone who aided me with the process.

So, yesterday the 7 days were up. I got on the Internet to see the status of my claim and of course, I couldn't tell what it was from the information provided, so I called the 1-800 number and spoke to another helpful agent on the phone who was also very polite and helpful in telling me that my claim has been pushed forward another 7-14 days. Humph. Okay, I'm not in a hurry, but I'm beginning to get suspicious. Being the patient person I am, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

Stay tuned...