Everyone has a hankering at one point or another to travel abroad. Seeing other parts of the world is a great and unparalleled experience. When I first went to Italy, someone told me to get international travel insurance. Only a student at the time (a young, foolish student at that), I declined. Luckily, nothing happened. But now that I’m a little older and wiser, I’ve discovered that international travel insurance is not the scam or money drain it appears to be.

The best thing that international travel insurance will grant you is a little piece of mind. OK, OK, that sounds like some pretty goofy sales pitch. But keep in mind, you are traveling to a different country. When I drive to a different state, the different symbols and signs and names and places disorient me enough not to want to do it more often. And that’s in a place where they drive on the same side of the road and use the same measurement units, let alone the same language. This is all a long way of saying that being in a new and foreign country can be discomforting and alarming. Having international travel insurance makes it less so.

There are some very practical situations that having international travel insurance can help with. International travel encounters many paradoxes, for lack of a better term. Let’s say you need to find an English speaking doctor. In Portugal, it’d help to speak Portuguese. But if you spoke Portuguese, you wouldn’t need an English speaking doctor. Another example is if you lose your passport. Just go to your Embassy, right? But you can’t get in the Embassy without a passport. International travel insurance helps fix these paradoxes and get you out of tricky situations that are much more common than you would think. And that’s not including its ability to recoup nonrefundable costs in delays and cancellations, and help with emergency medical care. Having international travel insurance is very much like having a guardian angel when you are a stranger in a strange land.

Traveling abroad was one of the best experiences of my life. Seeing France and Italy were totally the trans formative and eye-opening and delightful experience everyone had told me it would be. Looking back, there were some dangerously close calls, like the ones mentioned above.  Now that I understand the great benefits better, I can give you my personal opinion that in my future travels I will definitely search for the right international travel insurance package for me.