The Rise of Cancel-For-Work Travel Insurance: ‘Nothing is Sacred’

Travel Blog  •  Julia Ross  •  11.20.07 | 10:12 AM ET

imageWhen Lisa Belkin booked a winter vacation online, she was surprised to see a new option pop up on her laptop screen: Would she be interested in extra travel insurance that covers trip cancellation for “work reasons”?  Belkin’s reaction to the proposed upgrade, summed up in a recent New York Times column, resonates with the Blackberry-challenged among us: “My first thought—now that’s a policy I can use—was followed quickly by my second—it’s official: nothing is sacred.”

She writes:

Time was when the words “I have nonrefundable tickets” were up there with “a death in the family” and “admitted to the hospital” as gold-plated reasons for not coming to work. In the last year, however, that venerable excuse has been rendered potentially moot by at least two insurers. AIG, which introduced its plan just a few weeks ago, charges $24 to add the “cancel for work reasons” option to a travel insurance plan, while Access America, which created the category just last year, charges $19.

For the overworked, of course, canceling travel plans may make more sense than sitting in a beachside hotel for a week on conference calls; Belkin cites one survey that found 33 percent of workers stay in touch with the office while on vacation.  But it’s the symbolism of the new policy that most irks her: “The fact that scotching vacation for work has become so common, there is money to be made on it. We need those vacations. And now we can be $24 closer to leaping whenever work calls.”

Related on World Hum:
* One Thousand Places You Wish You Could See if You Weren’t Working so Damn Hard
* Why Don’t Americans Take Vacations? This Land is Already ‘Leisure Land.’
* How Do Americans Struggle With Vacations? Let Us Count the Ways.

Photo by Scott Ableman via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

 

 

 

Tags: North America, United States

Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


1 Comment for The Rise of Cancel-For-Work Travel Insurance: ‘Nothing is Sacred’

emily 11.20.07 | 3:48 PM ET

Sounds good if work is paying for it - and you request it.  But I can imagine some managers insisting that all employees have it (out of their own pocket) and if not that they come to work anyway.  Vacations are disappearing.

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