Canadian Travel Insurers Prepared to Offer COVID Coverage

Media announcements that major insurers are prepared to start covering COVID-related medical emergencies for Canadian out-of-country travelers will clearly put pressure on the federal government to ease its restrictions on international travel.

At present, Travel Canada maintains its “Avoid all non-essential “ warning for all foreign travel, even though European nations have opened up their borders to several countries—among them Canada—which they consider has adequately controlled the spread of COVID. The advisory warns that if travelers choose to defy the advisory “your insurance may not cover your travel or medical expenses.”

That of course, is a decision to be made by individual insurers not by government, and Manulife, Allianz and TUGO, Canada’s largest travel insurers have confirmed that as soon as the feds drop their advisory, they are prepared to offer COVID cover in most of their policies, under the existing limitations in their policies.

And Medipac International, the designated insurer for the Canadian Snowbird Association has gone one step further offering to provide COVID cover effective immediately, whether the government maintains its advisory or not. A spokesman for Medipac was quoted in the media as saying that snowbirds who own residences in the US are able to physically-distance just as effectively abroad as they can in Canada, and they are very “aware of the virus and the preventative measures that should be taken while travelling.”

The move by Canada’s insurers come several months after they announced that as COVID had become a widely-known event, they would not cover it in their medical policies and they gave Canadians out of the country at the time, several days to return to Canada before expiration of their benefits.

Since that time, insurance premium sales (estimated by the Conference Board of Canada as surpassing $990 million in 2018) have been stalled as the federal government maintained its blanket embargo on all out-of-country travel. It has also proven a serious impediment to Canadians making winter warm-weather travel plans as they are very committed to travel insurance. According to the CBoC, 76.6 percent of Canadians surveyed in 2018 had some form of travel insurance on their last trip out of the country.

The move by Canadian insurers follows similar steps by several of the larger American travel insurers to offer COVID cover for both medical and trip cancellation interruption cover for residents of the US.

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