Albertus Pizzany

Travel Insurance – Guidelines To Help You Pick A Good Deal

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:35 +0000

Travel and uncertainties walk besides each other. Buying a life insurance, to some extent, is of great help when it comes to assuring you some sort of financial security if you meet an unfavourable condition. But when you are travelling to foreign destination, you need an insurance, which is specifically meant to protect you against all unfavourable conditions during your tour. A travel insurance fulfills all such requirements of availing some sort of security during your tour.

Among the several types of insurance policies meant specifically for your trip, it becomes difficult to choose the best one suitable for you. There are two types of travel insurance available in the UK. Single trip insurance covers the single trip, while the annual trip holiday insurance covers all your trips in a year. If you are not a frequent traveller, you should opt for a single trip insurance. Similarly, if you are a frequent traveller, you should buy a multi-trip or an annual trip holiday insurance.

Choosing a right insurance for your trips depends on various factors. Before you have finally signed the deal, you need to check the reliability of the insurance. Check whether the cover you are having through this insurance is appropriate to protect you. Most of the travel insurance will cover luggage theft, stolen cash and other belongings. It will even give you healthcare and legal assistance. Many of the insurance fetch 24 hr medical and legal assistance.

It is not that all insurance covering your trip will give you fool-proof security. Most of the Travel Insurance policies do not cover you if you are going for adventure trips, which include activities like skiing, scuba diving, trekking and forest exploration. To avail insurance benefits on such trips, you need to buy a specific insurance covering all such adventurous activities. Moreover, you will not be covered if you have lost your cash, luggage and other belongings due to your own mistakes.

Travel Insurance, It’s a Spiritual Thing

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:32 +0000

Travel Insurance is the last thing many of us think about before a vacation. You feel relief once the trip is paid for. Then you start saving the “spending money.” By the time, you decide where to go, when to go, where to stay, which flight or cruise to take, you just don’t remember “travel insurance” and this could be a huge mistake for all of us.

We invest in a trip to far away places, we carefully purchase new clothes, sun glasses, new luggage, new underwear, and other accessories only to leave ourselves wide open for disaster and lost of money if any of the following events were to occur: Tour company operator decides that she needs a tummy tuck, at your expense, or the tour company disappears, or the Airline goes bankrupt or on strike, or the hurricane of the century, named after your ex-wife, makes a left turn and heads straight for your travel destination, or a part of California falls into the ocean due to an earthquake and this action upsets the rest of the oceans in the world, extreme flight delays, illness during the vacation because you drank the water, and the BIG one, terrorist attack, not to mention if you loose your passport, or worst, the ocean rises up and claims the beach front where you are staying.

All jokes aside, you can purchase travel insurance for protection against trip cancellation, trip interruption, missed connections, airline ticket coverage, medical expense, emergency medical transportation, baggage, baggage delay, accidental death and have 24 hour travel assistance service available to you from any where in the world.

The “Real” Reasons to purchase Travel Insurance

OK, enough of the negative. I’m sure you get the point. However, there is a more important reason to purchase Travel Insurance; It protects your assets back home if something were to happen during your trip.

Example: What about senior citizens who have waited their entire life to travel only to find out that Medicare will NOT cover anyone outside the United States! Can you image spending a sizable amount of your retirement income to pay medical bills in a foreign country? There are Major Medical Polices for travelers (including seniors) who are going abroad for at least 6 months and require more permanent insurance. These plans provide comprehensive medical protection including emergency medical treatment, wellness care and optional prescription drug coverage.

Example: People who had travel insurance had an entirely different experience when Emily (Hurricane) hit the Mexican Yucatan in July of 2005. First, everyone called and went to the airport trying to catch a flight out. At some point, there were no more flights out, there were only buses moving thousands of tourist inland away from the storm. Those with Travel Insurance were not concern with “cost” (I am sure it was enough just to worry about your life) realizing that they would be reimbursed through their Policy. Those without Insurance needed to be concerned with the cost of accommodations and food until Emily got a better attitude. For sure, many of the tourist without travel insurance had to spend a portion of their upcoming monthly budget before making it back home safely. (I wonder what happen to those who had reached their limit on the credit cards) We won’t go into what happen to the tourist that were staying in small hotels when Katrina hit town!

Another example of the “real” reasons to purchase Travel Insurance, you are skiing in the Alps, you are dogging the moguls (or they are dogging you) and you slip in the turn. No real problem, but you have to be airlifted to the nearest hospital to have x-rays taken. The cost of the airlift? Who pays? You do, if you don’t have the proper (travel) medical insurance or accident insurance. (Will paying for a helicopter ride to a hospital upset your monthly budget back home?)

And what about the classic example? You leave your money pouch with your credit cards and your Travelers Checks in the cab on the way back to your hotel. It happens all the time. No insurance, No reimbursement.

Important Information:

Please note, this is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: With the majority of the Travel Insurance companies, you MUST apply for the default, terrorism insurance and pre-existing insurance WITHIN 10 days of the initial booking of your trip. Bottom line, you can’t wait until your destination is on the US State Department’s Travel Warning List to purchase Insurance.

The less you have to worry about on vacations, the safer you will be. When traveling outside of the US, a good deal of your attention must be given to reviewing your surroundings. Always be aware of your surroundings.

Enough of the examples. If you protect yourself and your investment, you probably won’t need the Insurance Its’ almost like the Insurance Companies put an invisible “umbrella of protection” around us, just so they won’t have to pay or is that our prayers keeping us safe?

Early Time Travel Stories

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:10 +0000

The idea of traveling through time is one which is natural to our modern sensibilities. While there is some debate as to how possible such an exercise may be, most everyone at least acknowledges it as a popular concept in fictional literature.

However the idea of time travel as a plot possibility is one which is not found much in human culture throughout the ages. We have a few ancient stories that have a rough inclination towards traveling forward in time, but there are no recorded mentions of even a vague idea of backward time travel found in any written form until at least the 1700′s.

One of the earliest mentions we have of time travel at all comes from an ancient Hindu text called the Mahabharatha. This story dates back to around 700 BCE – 300 CE and involves King Revaita traveling to heaven to meet Brahma. Upon returning home he finds that several hundred years have passed.

In 720 CE we see the tale of Urashima Taro described in the Nihongi, which describes the adventure of a fisherman who travels to an undersea palace for three days. When he returns home he finds that 300 years have actually passed, and his house has collapsed and his family has all passed and everything he owned in life is gone. This is quite similar to Washington Irving’s story Rip Van Winkle.

A more modern version of the time travel story comes from Louis-Sebastien Mercien’s book “The Year 2440, A Dream If Ever There Were One”. This extremely popular book depicts the tale of a man who has a fight with a philosopher friend of his about the problems with Parisian society. He then falls asleep, and when he awakes he is in a Paris of the future. While the story was fictional the author actually intended the book to be a guideline for people to follow to create a utopian society.

The first story that even toys with the notion of backwards time travel is “Memoirs of the Twentieth Century” by Samuel Madden. This is comprised mostly of a series of letters sent by British Ambassadors regarding the state of the nation in 1997, and 1998. The overlying story is that the narrator of the book was given the letters by a guardian angel in 1733, although there is no explanation of how the angel acquired those letters.

Later time travel novels include A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, and the Time Machine, by HG Wells. The latter book, The Time Machine, is really the novel that popularized time travel as a literary concept, and has been the guideline for all time travel novels that have come since.