Trip Insurance and the Coronavirus

[Noel Schumacher]

Morning All,

We've had at least one faculty member have an international conference cancelled in Europe due to Coronavirus concerns. We are considering advising faculty to consider trip insurance for the next few months for international conference travel, as we suspect that other conferences might be cancelled as well.  Does anyone else have any knowledge or experience with conferences being cancelled recently?

Thanks,
Noel

[mattke...@gmail.com]

We had multiple trips cancelled since this question was posted.  With travel starting to be allowed again domestically trip insurance is allowed by the University so unless the sponsor has a more strict policy you should be able to have a traveler purchase it.  I would be sure that the insurance allows for cancellations due to COVID as I'm sure many of the insurance providers have updated their policy.  

[Carrie Meyer]

Certified Approver friends!

I know this is a bit off to the side of the specific issue being discussed but if any of you are learning of travel insurance policies that do indeed cover pandemics, it would be really helpful if you'd send in the specifics of who has changed to add pandemics to their coverage to tra...@umn.edu. The U Travel team isn't seeing movement in the insurance industry to cover pandemics--one of the big reasons why this statement was added to the COVID-19 travel-related info page on the Purchasing website:

Travel insurance needs to be approved by your college's Chief Financial Manager before it is purchased. Most travel insurance policies cover only a portion of the costs and have restrictions on the reason for canceling. Many insurance policies do not cover cancellations related to epidemic and pandemic events.

Thank you in advance for sharing anything you might see!

Carrie 

[mattke...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the additional info.  I wasn't aware that the Chief Financial Manager needed to approve prior to purchase.  I thought one up approval would be adequate based on the policy grid https://policy.umn.edu/finance/travel-appi.  I put in a comment in the document feedback section of the policy to add clarification as I think this expense will be more common if trip insurance is expanded to cover pandemic events.  It appears some of the companies are updating policy to include COVID.  Here is one I found:  https://www.travelexinsurance.com/covid19/?mobile=no