Travel Insured vs. Berkshire Hathaway

Travel Insured's version is a pair, not a switch. Cancel-for-any-reason and interrupt-for-any-reason are sold together, so you cannot buy the half you expect to need and leave the other. It sits on Deluxe and Platinum; Essential cannot carry it at any price. The conditions are ordinary enough: buy within 21 days of the initial deposit, cancel at least 48 hours before departure, and be at least 72 hours into the trip before the interruption half responds. The unusual part is what is missing: current materials show no dollar cap.

Berkshire Hathaway's version is a fixed quantity. Fifty percent, a $10,000 lid on the trip cost it will consider, LuxuryCare alone, added at purchase inside fifteen days. Each of those is a restriction, and stacked together they describe an upgrade that stops being much use at roughly the point where holidays start being expensive — which this carrier's own guide reads as a deliberate position rather than an oversight. A company competing on evacuation limits and claims speed has conceded the flexibility row to everybody else.

These are not gradations of one product. One scales with your booking and the other does not. A four-thousand-dollar coastal week is a fair fight, because both return something a household would notice. Push the number to twenty thousand and one benefit keeps moving while the other has stopped.

The second asymmetry runs the other way. Berkshire Hathaway tells you exactly what it will pay, so you can work out your own recovery before spending a dollar on the upgrade. The materials read for Travel Insured publish no reimbursement percentage at all. The missing cap is the finding; the rate is simply not stated. An uncapped benefit at an unpublished rate is a strong position and an incomplete one.

So the framing is not generous against stingy. It is a benefit whose size you cannot compute, against one whose size you would rather not.

Take a booking that is unremarkable for two people on a longer sailing. Twelve thousand dollars, prepaid and non-refundable, insured in full, cancelled for something no policy lists. Start with Berkshire Hathaway, since that one can be calculated from published figures alone.

The upgrade pays 50% and is capped at $10,000 of insured trip cost. Read the cap as a limit on the trip cost considered, and half of ten thousand comes back: $5,000. Read it as a ceiling on the payment instead, and half of twelve thousand comes back: $6,000. A thousand dollars separates those two readings on identical facts, and the certificate issued to you is the only document that decides. Either way you recovered less than you lost.

Now Travel Insured, where the sum runs out of published information before it runs out of money. No dollar cap appears in current materials, so the whole twelve thousand stays in scope. What proportion of it the plan pays is not published in the materials read here, and this page will not invent a figure. The shape is the argument: one benefit stops at a fixed sum and the other does not.

Scale the booking and the shape becomes the whole story. At $4,000 the Berkshire Hathaway upgrade returns two thousand and the cap never engages. At $12,000 it returns five or six thousand, and the cap is either biting or about to. At $30,000 — a suite, a long segment, four adults on one reservation — it returns five or ten thousand, depending on which reading your certificate uses. Either figure has stopped moving with the booking. The benefit does not get worse as the trip gets bigger. It stops keeping up.

One line in that comparison belongs to Berkshire Hathaway. A smaller sum settled in-app through Burst, on the strength of an uploaded receipt, is not straightforwardly worse than a larger sum that one 2026 third-party review puts at four to six weeks of processing. The difference there is cash flow rather than coverage. Anyone who has floated a cancelled holiday on a credit card through two statement cycles reads that sentence differently.

Travel Insured launched its current three-plan range on 11 December 2024, and its own FAQ states that residents of Montana, New York and Washington are not eligible for it and are sold the previous generation instead: Worldwide Trip Protector and Worldwide Trip Protector Edge. Not a renamed tier. A different generation of product.

Both of these carriers show smaller versions of that pattern — Travel Insured notes that bundle availability varies by state, and Berkshire Hathaway that published limits differ between distributors for some plans. This is larger. If you live in those three states, the plan names, the delay thresholds and the bundle menu described here all describe something you cannot purchase. Travel Insured scores 4 out of 10 on availability in its own guide, the lowest mark on that page.

So a resident of those states is not running the comparison this page describes, and the older plans have to be priced on their own terms. Nobody here can tell you whether the older generation carries the uncapped bundle, because that would be a claim about a product these sources did not cover.

Berkshire Hathaway varies by state in the unremarkable way: published limits differ between distributors for some plans, and LuxuryCare excludes certain destinations. Insurers revise that list as circumstances change, so check the current certificate against your itinerary rather than any snapshot. Most cruise routes are unaffected, and a repositioning voyage is worth the two minutes. The state-by-state guide explains why any of this happens, and the carrier directory shows how common it has become.

WaveCare is the cruise plan, built for sailing rather than adapted to it. It carries up to $75,000 of primary emergency medical cover under up to $750,000 of evacuation, three times the $250,000 commonly cited as a sensible minimum. The medical number looks modest beside Platinum's $500,000, and the two benefits stacked on top of it are the reason to want the plan anyway.

Two benefits sit on top of those limits. One is a flat $500 owed when the ship is confined without essential services, a set figure that answers the fact of a ruined week without ever answering the scale of it. The other is cover described as extending to a cruise line's financial default. That is the single exposure no cruise line can insure on its own paper, since the money would have to come out of the company that just failed. Insurers write default cover against defined conditions rather than as blanket bankruptcy protection, so those conditions are the part worth your evening. Nothing in the Travel Insured range is shaped like either one.

Above WaveCare sits LuxuryCare, with the highest limits in the range, cancellation for trips up to $100,000 a person, up to $1,000,000 of evacuation, and the only cancel-for-any-reason this carrier sells. Its medical limit is where the range stops being straightforward: the general plan page describes up to $100,000, while the company's own WaveCare-versus-LuxuryCare comparison shows $150,000. Two live pages, one insurer, a fifty-thousand-dollar disagreement. That is not a reporting error being tidied away here. It matters here for one reason: a company that cannot state its own limit consistently is one whose published percentages deserve checking before you plan a recovery around them.

Underneath, the spread runs a long way down. ExactCare carries up to $50,000 of medical under up to $500,000 of evacuation, and includes two children aged 17 and under in the premium of every insured adult, provided they are related to and travelling with that adult. ExactCare Value carries up to $15,000 and up to $150,000, is secondary rather than primary, and is reported to omit missed-connection protection. Fifteen thousand dollars is not a limit most travellers would want overseas.

The range therefore runs from $15,000 to a figure the company cannot name once, with the cruise plan at $75,000 somewhere in the middle of it. Travel Insured's range is shorter, higher and easier to hold in your head: around $50,000 on Essential, around $250,000 on Deluxe, around $500,000 on Platinum. On medical, Travel Insured scores 9 against Berkshire Hathaway's 6, and the spread rather than the top does the damage.

Berkshire Hathaway gives you fifteen days. Fifteen from the initial trip deposit to secure the pre-existing condition waiver or add cancel-for-any-reason, against the twenty-one much of the market allows, with the full non-refundable trip cost insured and medically able to travel on the day you buy. One deadline across the range, and at least simple to hold.

Travel Insured moves its deadline with the price, and moves it the wrong way. Platinum allows 21 days from the initial deposit for the waiver, while Deluxe and Essential allow 14. The cheaper the plan, the less time you get for the most time-critical decision in travel insurance — and the shopper sorting a quote screen by price is the one who arrives late. The CFAR/IFAR bundle carries its own published window of 21 days, worth confirming on your quote if you are buying Deluxe, since the waiver clock on that tier runs a week shorter than the bundle's does. The purchase-window guide sets out how far apart this series sits, and the calculator counts what you have left.

What the cheaper plans lose is more than days. Essential carries around $50,000 of medical cover and around $200,000 of evacuation, five optional bundles rather than eight, and no cancel-for-any-reason at any price. Its trip-delay benefit waits twelve hours before it starts paying, where Deluxe waits six and Platinum waits three. A twelve-hour threshold was designed around a missed hotel night. A three-hour one was designed around a ship that leaves at five.

Berkshire Hathaway's floor drops lower still, and fails differently. ExactCare Value is cheap, fast to claim on, and thin: $15,000 of medical, secondary cover, and no missed-connection benefit to get you to the next port. Neither company's entry plan belongs on an international cruise, and each is wrong for its own reason. Compare them on price and you are comparing the two products least likely to serve you.

Platinum earns its money on the clock rather than the limits, which is an odd thing to say about a plan whose current materials show around $500,000 of medical cover. Three hours to a delay payment of up to $2,000 at $200 a day, and baggage delay from three hours. Eight bundles rather than five, including the extreme sports and medical upgrade. A ship does not wait.

Five rows each and two ties is a level board and a misleading one. Travel Insured wins the rows about what a policy hands you. Berkshire Hathaway wins the rows about how the company behaves once you are actually holding it. Limits, upgrades, deadlines and delay triggers against a balance sheet, claims machinery and the ability to buy at all where you live.

Weighting is where an honest scorecard runs out of road. Twelve rows counted equally end level, and no household counts them equally. A cruiser with twelve thousand dollars committed and a parent in poor health weights one row above the other eleven combined. The count says nothing at all here. Your booking says everything.

The uncapped benefit is uncapped and unquantified. This page has made a great deal of a missing dollar cap, and a missing cap is a real finding. But the materials read for Travel Insured publish no reimbursement percentage for the bundle, and a percentage is half the calculation. Berkshire Hathaway's version is worse and fully specified, so you can work out that recovery before you buy. You cannot work out the other.

Cancel-for-any-reason is a benefit most people never use. Illness, injury, a death in the family, jury duty, the named list of things that go wrong — every ordinary way a holiday falls apart is covered by the base plan, with no upgrade of any kind. The upgrade exists for the reasons nobody wrote down. If you would only ever cancel for something the policy already names, this whole page is an argument about something you should not buy.

The family row is a tie that had to be argued into place. Both carriers publish a children-included benefit, and neither publishes it on every plan. An earlier version of this page recorded the Travel Insured side as unstated, because at the time it was. Travel Insured includes children 17 and under travelling with an insured adult at no extra cost on the base plan, on Platinum and Deluxe, with Essential left out and the optional bundles still charged for the child. Berkshire Hathaway includes two children 17 and under in each insured adult's premium, and does it on ExactCare, which is not the plan a cruiser gets sent to. Its own guide scores that an 8 where this page marks it to a 7, on the reasoning that a family benefit sitting one plan away from WaveCare is worth less to somebody buying a sailing than it would be to somebody buying a fortnight ashore. Leave the 8 where it stood and Berkshire Hathaway takes the row and the board with it, six to five. One point of judgement is the whole margin.

Speed is a form of payment, and this page has treated it as a service feature. Five thousand dollars arriving in days is worth more to some households than a larger sum arriving after two statement cycles. The four-to-six-week figure comes from a single 2026 third-party review rather than an audit, and the five-times-faster claim comes from Berkshire Hathaway's own marketing rather than an independent measurement. Both numbers are soft. Neither is nothing.

Neither source guide publishes a price, and neither does this one. The uncapped bundle costs something, the tier carrying it costs something, and on a modest booking the extra premium could plausibly exceed the extra recovery. Anyone telling you which is cheaper without quoting both is guessing.

And a quick answer is not a generous one. People who have claimed with Berkshire Hathaway report decisions made strictly against whatever the certificate says its words mean. Who counts as a family member, who counts as a travelling companion, which reasons were covered at all. Speed tells you when the file closed rather than how it closed, and the second of those is the one funding your rebooking.