Data from insurance comparison website Squaremouth on Tuesday
showed the number of insurance policies purchased for U.S.
domestic trips over the upcoming holiday was up 170%, compared
to the same period of 2019.
Some 40% of all Thanksgiving travelers specifically searched for
coronavirus cover, replacing top concerns from previous years,
such as weather and financial defaults, and spurring a rise in
the overall cost of cover.
"Cancel-for-any-reason" policies, which typically allow
cancellations up until two days before departure and a 75%
reimbursement, cost up to 40% more than a regular policy.
"It's just gotten to a point I think people are tired of being
stuck at home and they're looking to get away and go somewhere,"
said Jeremy Murchland, president of U.S. travel insurer Seven
Corners.
More than 3 million passengers passed through U.S. airports over
the weekend, discarding advice from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention to stay at home as coronavirus infections
reached daily records.
Overall traveler numbers are still down 60% from a year ago, but
Squaremouth, one of the country's main insurance price
aggregators, said its data suggested that the total number of
travelers seeking cover was up 26% year-on-year.
The data from Squaremouth is based on all travel insurance
policies purchased on its website between March 12 and Nov. 9
for travel over the week of Thanksgiving.
With trips to popular European destinations effectively banned,
and the risks of quarantine and other curbs weighing on
travelers' decision making, overall requests for cover to
foreign locales were lower than those for domestic trips.
Those for the Bahamas and Costa Rica were down by just over
half. Requests for insurance for trips to Mexico, however, were
down just 23% year-on-year, and for the Turks and Caicos
islands, just off Haiti, where luxury hotels are guaranteeing
COVID-19-secure bubbles, they are up more than 500%.
For those traveling outside the United States, a travel
insurance policy that also has medical cover for COVID-19 will
cover medical treatment that a normal healthcare policy would
not, as well as potentially medical evacuation.
Courtney Glass, a California-based stage actress, is insuring a
trip with her parents to Guatemala to rendezvous with her sister
and newborn niece Madi.
"Madi arrived right as the virus did. She's crawling and trying
to talk now and we just don't want to miss any more of this
time," she said.
"If we don't go now, we probably won't go until after the
holidays. And potentially, not until after the vaccine that
everybody's talking about is distributed."
(Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Additional
reporting by Suzanne Barlyn in Washington Crossing, Penn;
Editing by Patrick Graham and Sriraj Kalluvila)
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