We are just about three weeks away from our departure on July 1, 2023. We would like to be excited, but once again, we are dealing with health issues for our aging mom’s, specifically Stephanie’s mom at the present time. She is once again in the hospital, and is not recovering as well as she did on the past several hospital stays. In fact, she will most likely be going to a skilled nursing facility this time for additional care once she is discharged from the hospital, hopefully in the next several days.
We are not sure if we will be able to go on this trip or not. It will be based on how well she recovers from this latest hospital stay, and how soon she may be able to be settled into a skilled nursing facility. Stephanie is trying to get her into her place of employment, National Health Care, but they may not be able to support her mom’s new feeding system, which requires there to be a Rn to administer the feeding via an IV.
In order to be prepared for the worse, I have been pulling together information we might need to put in a claim to our Travel Insurance policy. Is is not as straightforward since we are travelling with another couple, and some of the reservation deposits were initially made and paid for by them, and we paid some of the balances due.
Some of these are non-refundable, and would have to be reimbursed by the insurance if we were unable to go on the trip. We are confident that we would be able to file the claim under a covered reason, but we also purchased an additional Cancel For Any Reason (CFAR) rider just in case we had issues with the covered claim. However, we would only be able to recover 75% of the costs under the CFAR provision.
Another issues is that there is one accommodation in Seward that would be quite large for just our travelling partners Ashley and Bryan, and is sized and priced for our party of four. We are not sure what will happen with that accommodation, it is probably too late to make a change and find something else, especially if we cancel last minute.
We anticipate trying to make a decision in the next several days, maybe as late as two weeks ahead of our departure date on July 1, 2023. As of this date, we have not discussed any of this with our fellow travelers, but intend to do so an the next couple of days as we assess Stephanie’s mom’s recuperation in the hospital.
This is the first trip in a long time that we have done with other’s and it will be a hassle to file the trip insurance claim if we do not go because of the splits in the payments. In hind sight, we would have been better off using our own credit card for our portion of the reservations to make things easier from a claim filing and supporting documentation perspective. I will be making some contact with the insurer to ask some questions about splitting costs that we not originally paid for by us, would we need to write checks to show a clear paper trail of our costs to reimburse Ashley and Bryan for the initial payments, we will have to ask.
On one last note, we would have to cancel before 48 hours from our departure, which is 6:58 AM on July 1, 2023. In addition, since the insurer is not open for business that early, we have to move that time forward to the day before, and call in before they close at 6:00 PM, so our real cancel date not to loose the CFAR coverage is NLT 6:00 PM on June 28.
Hopefully, short of a severe situation, we would be able to either cancel farther out of not at all. The downside of all of this is that somewhere in the next three weeks, we have to pack in case we do get to go. It is just a mentally hard exercise to go through.
We have looked at the historical weather and temperatures at the various locations for the time we are in Alaska, so we can make sure we are packed with the proper clothes for the temperatures we could experience.
We had thought about making a reservation for flying to Denali and landing on the glacier while we are in Talkeenta, but will have to evaluate that based on the cancellation policy, or just plan to have it covered as a claim.
That is all for now, we just have to hope for the best for Stephanie’s mom and go from there.