6 Things Travel Advisors Should Understand about Medjet

Medjet is not travel insurance.

That’s the first thing Medjet’s vice president of marketing and communications Sheri Howell wants everyone – advisors and consumers included – to understand about the company.

“We’re a private membership program. Not insurance,” she told TMR.

In many ways, that makes it easier to sell. There are far fewer rules and no loopholes. In other ways, it’s more difficult. Advisors understand where in the travel planning and booking process they need to bring up insurance. But when do you bring up medical transportation? Does every trip even need it?

To help travel advisors understand what Medjet is, what it does – and doesn’t do, and why advisors should be selling it (or even gifting it) to clients, TMR met up with Howell to find out what six things travel advisors should know.

1. Bed-to-Bed Medical Transport

While basic travel insurance and medical travel insurance can cover many different situations ranging from trip interruption and trip cancellation to medical evacuation and hospital fees, Medjet assists with only one – getting from whatever hospital you land at while traveling to your home hospital.

(There is a second type of Medjet membership that provides help in destinations embroiled in political violence or natural disasters, but that is not covered in this article.)

“Getting stuck is what Medjet prevents,” Howell explained.

As an example, she told TMR of a river cruise traveler who had to go to a hospital in Europe after getting sick.

“One day she was in the communicable disease ward, the next day the cancer ward, the next day she was in the maternity ward. They had to keep moving her to open beds and there was zero continuity of care.”

Another cruiser slipped during an excursion and broke her leg. The hospital she was sent to wouldn’t let her husband accompany her. Nor would they communicate with him. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead until she called him the next morning.

In both of these cases, Medjet covered everything required to get them from the hospital they were stuck at, to a hospital near their home.

2. Does Not Cover Emergency Medical Evacuation

Technically a continuation of the above point, Howell emphasized that Medjet is not medical evacuation insurance. It does not cover or reimburse the actual medical evacuation that is needed to get a patient from, say, a cruise ship, to the hospital.

(Howell told TMR that the question of whether Medjet will send a helicopter to remove a cruise passenger from a ship is so common that Medjet had to create a cruise info page to answer it. The answer, by the way, is no.)

This type of transport is what’s referred to as emergent transport and that’s what insurance covers – getting you from where you got injured or sick to a medical facility where you can receive necessary and often emergency attention.

3. Not Only for Long-Distance or Foreign Travel

During our conversation with Howell, TMR asked if Medjet only makes sense for clients going farther abroad. Do clients need it for a Caribbean cruise? What about a domestic vacation?

“I have so many testimonials from people who were put ashore in the Caribbean,” Howell told TMR. While cruise lines might try to keep a passenger onboard to get them to a hospital in the U.S., it doesn’t always work out that way.

And even if you wind up in Miami or Fort Lauderdale?

“If you’re from Omaha or Chicago, does your entire family disrupt their life to move to Miami to be with you, to be your patient advocate?”

Even if you’re in a city with some of the best healthcare, like New York City, the cost for a family member to be with you can be prohibitively expensive.

“If you were on a trip to New York and you got hospitalized in New York and your spouse came, that’s like $400 a night just for the hotel room. Then you’ve got food and taxis… There’s all these other expenses that add up.”

For less than the cost of one hotel night, a client could have their entire medical transfer back home covered.

4. No Time Limitation on Purchase

Medjet has a team of two dedicated to working with travel agencies, advisors, and consortia. The most common question they encounter, Howell said, is: at what point in the sales journey should they be bringing up the opportunity to purchase Medjet?

There is no single answer to this question, specifically because a Medjet membership does not have to be purchased within a certain timeframe of booking a trip. So long as your client is younger than 75, they can enroll up to the day before they leave.

Whether advisors want to bring it up when they bring up travel insurance in general or wait until closer to departure date is entirely up to them. Perhaps, your client wants to purchase their insurance right away, just in case they have to cancel, but wait until closer to departure to consider something like Medjet.

“Every advisor is different and their clients are different. Is this the one big trip so it’s a short-term membership or are they frequent travelers… There’s not really one educational pathway.”

With that said, Howell added she thinks the all-at-once approach is probably easiest. Even if the client doesn’t purchase it right away, advisors are already bringing up insurance and worst-case scenarios. Why not include being stuck in an inadequate hospital and mention Medjet?

5. Makes an Easy Client Gift

Howell told TMR she knows a Virtuoso travel advisor that purchases Medjet memberships as gifts for some of his clients. A short-term membership (ie, covering just one trip) costs as little as $99. A full-year membership starts at $315 — but that doesn’t include the travel advisor discount, which can be used for gifting.

The advisor she knows gives it to clients his who take two or three trips a year. It enriches his relationship with his clients, she said, because it shows he cares.

“He’ll never be in the position where he’s sold them the cruises, the travel insurance, and then something bad happens and they can’t get moved home because it’s not deemed ‘medically necessary,’” Howell said. “If it’s a really valuable client and you’re selling $20,000, $30,000 cruises and you’re making commission off of that, work out $300 bucks at the end of the year and put that person under protection for a year.”

6. Check with Your Consortia

Currently, Howell told TRM she knows of preferred partner relationships with Virtuoso, Signature, and WESTA, but there may be others. (Virtuoso’s Matthew Upchurch is a strong advocate of Medjet after his own father had to be transferred from a hospital in India back to the U.S.) Double check with your consortia or Host if you’re unsure. Advisors and agencies do not need to be a member of a preferred consortia to work with Medjet.