travel insurance

Travel insurance comes in 3 flavors; trip cancellation, trip interruption, and medical assistance. Trip cancellation covers any number of reasons why you would need to cancel your trip...in your case this sounds like just a int'l flight. Trip interruption covers things like travel delay, lost luggage, and general assistance related to getting to your destination when things go wrong. Last, medical assistance covers for accidents, injuries, or even deaths that occur while traveling. It must be said that most types of travel insurance only cover you until you get back home. So if you need medical assistance, the insurance policy will get you back to your home, where you will need to cover all costs on your own. That would be a disaster for you as uninsured medical costs in the US are 10x higher then they are in Germany. When buying medical assistance insurance, look for policies the cover healthcare costs vs. policies that just cover costs related to medical evacuation. For a trip to Germany your top priority is to get some basic healthcare insurance, not necessarily medical evacuation insurance. The costs for travel insurance differ greatly. Medical assistance with only medical evacuation is the cheapest, costing about $15 per week. Medical assistance with healthcare coverage pricing depends on your age and regions of travel but is also on the cheap side. Trip interposition and trip cancellation are where things get more costly. Expect to pay between 8% and 9% of your trip cost to get cancellation insurance. Trip cancellation insurance is the most expensive but it also covers the most, including evacuation, healthcare, and trip interruption. There are 2 companies that do travel insurance well. Travel Guard is the biggest by far but I prefer the policies offered by TravelEx. Both offer competitive policies that are easy to compare. There are a few good websites for suggesting a policy that is right for you, but I have this list at work...I'll update my post with this info. The website is InsureMyTrip.com. It supports lots of insurance companies and covers US and non-US residents.