IMG vs. Seven Corners

IMG front-loads its difficulty. Four plans — Choice, Lite, Travel SE, Travel LX — and IMG states openly that SE and LX include benefits not found on Choice rather than larger versions of them. A different plan document depending on where you live; an underwriter decided by plan form and state; four published deadlines. Every one is answerable before you spend a dollar, and every one has to be.

Seven Corners back-loads its difficulty. Buying is easy: one underwriter, one date, two plans with an obvious right answer for cruising. Then the policy starts asking things of you. Insure all your prepaid, non-refundable trip costs; insure anything added later within 15 days; cancel two days out for CFAR to respond; and check your state, where Montana gets secondary evacuation and Missouri secondary medical and evacuation.

Neither is dishonest, and both publish all of it. But they fail differently, and the failure mode is most of what you are buying. Get IMG wrong and you bought a plan whose deadline you misread — the damage happens at checkout and surfaces months later. Get Seven Corners wrong and you bought the right plan, then voided part of it in June over a shore excursion.

Up to $500,000 of emergency medical, primary, on the top plan. IMG publishes that on Travel LX with a qualification: the applicable form depends on your state. Seven Corners publishes it on Trip Protection Choice with its own: primary for medical, dental and evacuation, except that Montana residents get secondary evacuation and Missouri residents get secondary medical and evacuation. Same figure, two ways of admitting it moves — both well clear of the working floor this site uses for cruising.

Up to $1,000,000 of emergency medical evacuation, four times the $250,000 commonly cited as a sensible minimum. IMG states it consistently and adds a separate $50,000 for non-medical emergency evacuation — unrest, security incidents, natural disaster — which very little else in this series carries; Seven Corners publishes $1,000,000, but one distributor listing shows $500,000.

Twenty days from the initial deposit, the match least like a match. For Seven Corners it is one published condition gating both the waiver and CFAR, with a 60-day look-back. For IMG it appears once, on a marketplace listing describing LX with CFAR, alongside three other dates. Identical number, different confidence entirely.

Cancel for any reason at 75%, the market standard rather than the halved figure some carriers settle for, and an optional upgrade on the top plan at both. Seven Corners adds the detail worth the row: cancellation up to two days before departure, where much of the market demands 48 hours. IMG's CFAR carries its own deadline, which one 2026 review site puts at 14 days.

The underwriter first, because it is the shorter problem. Depending on plan form and state, IMG cover may be underwritten by SiriusPoint America Insurance Company or by United States Fire Insurance Company, which means two companies and two ratings. AM Best upgraded SiriusPoint's rated operating subsidiaries to A (Excellent) in April 2026; United States Fire has held A+ (Superior) since the Crum & Forster upgrade of August 2025. Both are sound; neither is the one to assume; only your certificate settles it.

One detail says more about the industry than about IMG. IMG's own disclaimer still describes an older, lower SiriusPoint rating — written before the upgrade and never refreshed. A carrier understating its own underwriter's financial strength for years, because updating a paragraph was nobody's job.

The deadlines are worse, because four published sources give four different dates, and they do not all describe the same benefit. A marketplace, on LX: the waiver is available at or before final payment; the same marketplace, on LX with CFAR: within 20 days of the deposit. A specialist broker: within 24 hours of final payment, 60-day look-back; a 2026 review site describes CFAR instead, added within 14 days.

They may not be contradictions, since different plans, forms, jurisdictions or vintages could explain all four, and IMG says the plan document you receive depends on where you live. It changes nothing about what you have to do, which is disregard every date published anywhere, including the twenty-day figure this page leans on.

Buying shortly after your deposit gives the best chance of clearing whichever window is yours. It does not secure the benefit — you must still be medically able to travel when you buy, and insure later-added trip costs on time, a clause that returns in section 07. If anyone has a condition to declare, the purchase-window guide shows what the rest of the market publishes and the calculator counts the days gone.

Trip Protection Choice carries up to $500,000 of emergency medical and up to $1,000,000 of medical evacuation, and the medical is primary, which means Seven Corners pays first. It adds accidental death cover, political and security evacuation, pet kennel expenses and Event Ticket Protection up to $15,000 — a benefit almost nothing else carries.

Trip Protection Basic carries up to $100,000 of emergency medical and it is secondary, with evacuation up to $250,000. On a domestic trip, defensible. On an international sailing the limit is not the real cost. The structure is.

Here is what secondary means at the moment you use it. You are in a hospital in a foreign port holding a bill. Under a primary plan, one claim goes to one insurer; under a secondary plan, you claim on your own health insurance first, wait while it processes a foreign hospital charge, then claim the balance from Seven Corners. Two insurers, two claims, in the order least convenient to the person who is unwell. The $400,000 gap is the headline; the word secondary is the expensive part.

Seven Corners also sells a dedicated Cruise Travel Insurance plan, reported at up to $250,000 of medical, and very few carriers sell one at all, which is what makes it tempting. Price it against Choice rather than assuming the plan with cruise in its name is the better cruise policy.

IMG has the same disease in a milder form. Choice, Lite, SE and LX read like four sizes of one thing, and IMG itself says SE and LX include benefits not found on Choice at all. Hospital of choice sits on LX, and so does the $50,000 non-medical evacuation benefit. Buy down either range and you are not buying less of the same thing. You are buying a different thing with a similar name.

Five conditions sit between buying a Seven Corners plan and keeping the benefits you paid for, and four of them are ordinary. Buy within 20 days of the initial deposit, or neither the waiver nor CFAR is available at any price. Insure all your prepaid, non-refundable trip costs, cancel two days out to use CFAR, and check your state, where Montana and Missouri change the deal.

The third condition is the one that costs people money. Anything added to the trip after buying must be insured within 15 days of paying for it. Not within 15 days of the original deposit, but within 15 days of that payment. Book a shore excursion in March for an August cruise and the clock starts in March, quietly; a hotel night in May starts a second, a transfer in June starts a third. Three purchases, three fortnights, no reminders sent.

Miss one and you risk the pre-existing condition waiver and the CFAR benefit you already paid for — over a purchase that had nothing to do with your deposit and may have cost less than dinner. The benefit at stake is worth thousands. The trigger is a confirmation email you forgot to forward.

None of this is hidden, and the fix is trivial: every time you spend money on this trip, tell your insurer within a fortnight. The problem is psychological, because nobody buys insurance expecting an ongoing obligation.

IMG puts no number on an equivalent rule, though it is not silent; its own conditions include insuring later-added trip costs on time. What IMG does not publish is the interval, which leaves a possibility this page is obliged to say out loud: Seven Corners may be scoring worse here for the sin of telling you the number.

The tally tells you less than usual, because of what the ties are made of. Five of the six coverage rows are tied, and all four Seven Corners wins are administrative. Read as a chart, Seven Corners is ahead; read as a decision, this is a carrier that covers you identically and files better, against one that covers you identically and leaves you alone.

Only one of these carriers has a price signal, and it points the wrong way. Seven Corners' guide on this site records that reviewers consistently describe the plans as more expensive than many competitors, and that some carry a deductible; it scores six out of ten on value. There is no equivalent finding for IMG — not because IMG is cheaper, but because the sources never mention its pricing.

The rolling-clock asymmetry may be an artefact of disclosure. Seven Corners publishes a 15-day rule; IMG requires later-added costs insured on time and publishes no interval at all. IMG may carry a comparable requirement and simply never have put a number beside it — in which case this page has rewarded silence and penalised candour, the failure it accuses distributors of.

The twenty-day match holds up worse than any other row. Seven Corners' twenty days is a stated condition, while IMG's is one line on one marketplace listing, beside three dates that disagree with it. Calling them the same window was a convenience the hero panel needed and the page has relied on.

Two of the eleven scorecard rows were invented for this page. Underwriter certainty and life after purchase are not among the eight dimensions the carrier guides score against. They were added because they are what separates these two — and because without them the scorecard was nine near-ties.

In some states this comparison is between two front doors on one building. United States Fire Insurance Company underwrites all of Seven Corners' business, and at least part of IMG's, depending on plan form and state, and both sit inside Crum & Forster, which stands behind Faye and owns Travel Insured International outright. Buy IMG in the right state and the company on your certificate is the one that would have been on the other. The plan terms differ. The risk-taker may not. The directory maps the rest.

Neither carrier's service record here is evidence, and it should not be read as any. Reviews of IMG mention customer service being hard to reach at peak times, confusion about the waiver requirements, and adventure-activity gaps not obvious in the documentation; reviews of Seven Corners mention slow claims processing, against a long-established assistance operation. None of it establishes either company's approval or payment rate.