When setting up a recent home exchange through Guest to Guest I noticed that a new option was offered to people finalizing a swap: travel medical insurance. This is the first time I’ve seen a home swap network offer medical insurance, and I think it’s a smart move by Guest to Guest. Although I generally think travel insurance isn’t a good investment (unless you are in a situation where cancellation is likely), medical insurance can be important if your primary policy doesn’t cover you while traveling. Although many countries have very reasonably priced and high quality health care, hospitalization can still be costly, and there’s no way to get cheap medical evacuation if something goes seriously wrong and you need to be returned home.
The Guest to Guest policy appears to be available to anyone booking a home exchange through their website, though the terms are different from people living within France and those outside of France. For me, traveling from the United States, I would be covered for up to €80,000 for medical expenses in addition to coverage of early return costs in the event of a medical emergency or death of a close relative, and up to €15,000 for search and rescue. The medical expenses portion looks like it covers repatriation, but the wording suggests that getting you to a local hospital would be considered sufficient if they can handle your condition, so this probably won’t cover medical evacuation to your home country except in the case where your condition can’t be dealt with in a local hospital. If things are really that bad I’m not sure you want to be fighting with your insurance company over whether or not you qualify.
I’m pretty sure I was offered this insurance for €4 per day, but I didn’t save a screen shot of that offer and now I can’t find information about this on the Guest to Guest website. I reached out to the GtoG team a few weeks ago but they didn’t provide me with anything useful by the time of this post. If I get any updates I will share them in the comments.
Here’s a full screen shot of the insurance option:
Ok I asked, apparently Lindsey who’s American and works for Guesttoguest should have replied but there was a misunderstanding with Alice, she should do it soon.
Thanks Etienne, you’re awesome! Looking forward to hearing more.
ok I ask again, Alice if you read me here…
You didn’t any reply from Guesttoguest ? I asked personnaly Alice who works for it to answer you, she told me she would.
Hi Etienne, I haven’t heard anything back yet. I let them know the article was up on here in case they wanted to add more details in the comments. Thanks for pursuing that, I am curious to hear more about this feature.