travel insurance is important!

when we decided to cancel our trip to paris+london, we were prepared to forfeit all the sunken costs made for accom+rail+other misc stuff. basis on the full refund from SQ and the extremely short turnaround time to make a call for the replacement trip, hubbi and i were on the same page that we are prepared to give up the deposits/payments made earlier in lieu of a peace of mind and ensuring of safety.

we did called up some of the service providers if cancellations/refunds are possible given the circumstances but as the terms and conditions set out in the fine print for most of them, that's almost not possible. a friend of ours mentioned travel insurance and we were like yes, we did buy and why not give it a try but we weren't too confident. we just checked if the terms and conditions exclude terrorism which it didn't and we called up the insurance customer service to clarify. the advice we had was to fill up a claim form and send that in together with supporting documents with responses from vendors/service providers saying it's not possible to cancel/refund.

we didnt have time to do that so what we did was send out emails to get confirmations from vendors before our trip and let them reply in due time. so when we were back in SG 2 weeks back. we compiled the necessary and sent over to the insurance by snail mail (yes, we confirmed twice.. LOL). finally, we had a call from the agent today that we will be eligible for the claims and the refund will be made in few weeks time! what a great piece of news!

so we will be able to get back the monies paid for paris+london accom, eurostar, TGV train tickets and museum tickets! all these amount to close to 3k for us. it's really a blessings.
i always buy travel insurance more for flight delays and loss of baggage (which we unfortunately experienced at CDG airport 12 years ago and very fortunately able to claim under travel insurance as we buy all the necessities before the luggage was returned to our hotel 2 days later). but it definitely seems like travel insurance is equally important for trip cancellations like this. 

let's all be safe and make sure we buy travel insurance for our travels. it's not worth it to not purchase it just to save that tens to hundreds.