This last month has been a bit of a whirlwind, and life feels like kinda a blur right now. Particularly the last couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I got back from one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. I got to visit some pretty amazing places (if you’re following me on instagram, you’ll already have seen my holiday spam from Toronto, Way Home Festival, Chicago and New York). I met a whole bunch of brilliant people and made a lot of new friends. And after the longest time, I’ve actually started feeling like myself again. A lot like myself again. But my trip wasn’t without its own little dramas! Which sort of prompted me to think of a few new post ideas, and to talk about what I learned from my own comedy of errors. A lot of bloggers lately have started writing about their travels. But not a lot of them write about what happens when things don’t go as planned.
I’ve got a couple of posts that I want to write up – from getting the right insurance to being better prepared with your hand luggage. But let’s start with the more boring (but possibly most important) one first: travel insurance. When it comes to holidays I’ve always thought of myself as pretty prepared… I always get good insurance (and of course check the fine print), I pack a mini medical bag… So planning my trip to Canada and the States, I thought I’d covered every possible avenue. And since I was spending a long time travelling alone, I thought I’d bring my MacBook along.. you know, in case I felt mega productive and wanted to blog out there. Suffice to say that didn’t happen. But it did spur me on to take out some proper gadget travel insurance. Because when I double double checked the small print of my travel insurance policy, I was pretty surprised to find that the personal effects cover (up to £5,000) only covered me for items up to £100 each. Each. Having worked in insurance, there’s a lot of small print that can trip you up with what’s covered and what’s not. It’s the same with home insurance or car insurance, the things that you expect to be covered sometimes just aren’t! There’s all these tricky little loopholes they can write into policies that make it hard to figure out what’s actually covered and what’s not. Luckily, my gadgets were all safe and sound on this holiday, but after my suitcase went missing in transit for a couple of days, it has made me a lot more wary of taking out cover online. Especially when comparison sites make it seem easy to see what’s covered, but leave out some of the important facts. Like the personal effects, I realised all of a sudden that some of my favourite clothes were now not only potentially lost, but potentially only items up to the value of £100 were covered. Which is a bit of a blow when you remember that your All Saints leather jacket was £300 on its own. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to have my suitcase recovered without needing to claim on my insurance. But it’s definitely been an eyeopener. As any blogger towing about an expensive bit of kit knows, you need to have a contingency plan of what to do if something goes wrong. And an insurance policy that covers their big old fancy camera and excessive wardrobe.