When do you typically purchase insurance?

[MomOTwins]

In general, outside of weather disruptions, what do most people "use" the insurance for? We're taking our little ones on their first cruise and trying to find out what would have to happen in order for the insurance to be beneficial.

We get it for three reasons.

(1) We have small kids that are prone to getting sick and are concerned of what would happen if a kid got sick and we either chose to cancel (e.g., pneumonia in the hospital) or we were denied boarding or quarantined (which is a fairly common thing--my husband was quarantined and so was my friend's daughter on separate DCL cruises);

(2) Death in the family and needing to attend a funeral during the scheduled vacation date. Happened to us on a non-DCL Walt Disney World vacation once and we had to cancel two days before our vacation. I didn't have insurance then and had to eat the cost of the non-refundable plane tickets, but WDW was nice and waived the reschedule fee, which they might not normally do but luckily we were scheduled to be there during a hurricane (I think it was Hurricane Matthew but may be mixing it up?) during our trip dates so they were given leeway that week to waive fees.

(3) Accident while on the ship requiring medical treatment and/or early return home. Our health insurance is crummy and does not cover any international health care, so that is a real concern for us. Also, if we had to return home from a foreign port due to hospitalization there, insurance would offset the cost of last-minute international airfare.

 

[Maggie'sMom]

I get it for several reasons. Penalties for cancellation on a cruise tend to be much greater than a land based trip. I wouldn't want to lose all the money I'd spent to book a cruise if we had to cancel close to the sail date. My DD has pre-existing conditions that could cause a cancellation, but even outside of that, there are many things that could cause us to cancel last minute such as gastrointestinal illness that would prevent us from boarding, another type of illness, a car accident, death or illness of a family member, etc.

We could have delays in transportation to the port which could cause us to miss the ship. We were flying down the night before our first 7 night cruise and our flight was delayed multiple times. All told, we were delayed 5 hours and I was getting nervous at one point that we might miss the boat if the delays continued.

There's the possibility of needing medical evacuation either from the ship or from a foreign port and the cost of medical care in a foreign country that might not be covered by my health insurance.

Weather issues are a miniscule factor into my decisions to purchase insurance.

 

[randumb0]

I purchase it because because there are several in our family that are 80+ including one member that is 105.