Travel Guard "dynamic" pricing
I am posting this both as a warning and also wondering how others are handling this situation.
I used to insure the entire trip cost at time of deposit for clients mostly because this was how I was trained.
Then I learned we had the option of insuring deposit only, insuring any payments along the way and insuring final payment which I started doing for clients - especially elderly clients with expensive trips and staggeringly expensive travel insurance policies. My concern was the time period between deposit and final payment - if they had to cancel during that time and had insured the entire trip cost they lose the whole premium and essentially over-pay for insurance.
This used to work well, but in the past few years Travel Guard has changed to "dynamic" pricing.
So, I have clients who posted a $5000.00 trip payment in April. At that time their increase in premium was $575.39.
Today they are ready to post an additional $5000.00 trip payment and their premium to cover the same trip payment has increased to $689.63!
I think this is a lot and, of course, the clients are disappointed.
I am interested to know if anyone else is running into this with other insurance companies.
I always book Preferred and occasionally Deluxe. I spoke with Lorne today and he said the accumulative amount of the payments should add up to the original quote based on full trip cost, but this is different than my understanding before this specific incident when I was informed of "dynamic" pricing. I knew the premium amounts could fluxuate, but I did not expect this jump in price. Lorne is an excellent representative for Travel Guard and I do trust him. I will follow up on this post again-later when final payment is posted and increases in premium are paid. He agreed, best practice in the client's best interest is to insure deposit and any additional pre-paid and non-refundable payments as we go along rather than paying for the full travel insurance premium based on known trip cost at time of booking to prevent clients from overpaying for their policy in the event of cancellation between deposit time and final payment due date.