I want to remind everyone just how bad of a deal travel insurance is.

Yes, there are instances where travel insurance makes sense or may be practically a requirement. Health and/or evacuation insurance for foreign travel and/or cruising may be practically a necessity. You don’t want to be paying tens of thousands of dollars when you need a helicopter to take you off your cruise ship to a hospital.

But if your primary reason for purchasing insurance is insuring yourself against a trip that has to be skipped or modified last minute, you can probably skip it.

The way I insure against these sort of things:

- Buying hotel rooms that are not prepaid and refundable up until the day before check-in

- Paying attention to airline policies. Sure, my United airlines fare isn’t refundable, but if I cancel the flights I get all the money back in flight credits I can use within 6 months.

- Rental cars, same deal as hotels. They’re easy to book with no payment up front.

- Use a good travel credit card with its own trip insurance perks (usually not as comprehensive)

Do I pay more to book flexible like this? Yeah, but I can also keep my money gaining interest until the day of the trip. And the thing about travel insurance is that you still have to deal with the claims process if you need to use it.

> Rental cars

That's a whole new can of worms though. Their scams can be a lot more expensive, and are usually after the fact (although they'll try them at the pickup counter too).

It's one of those things I will specifically always arrange through a third party that covers insurance as well, which is really an insurance against the rental companies scams.