Don’t Get Sick Aboard a Crusie Ship … Just ask Yvonne Boike & Nick Panos (Travel Insurance, what Travel Insurance?)

The incredible stories of what can occur on cruise ships continue. If a cruise ship vacation is without incident, one needs to consider themselves luck. Such was not the case for Yvonne Boike and her fianci, Nick Panos.

It all started when Nick Panos woke up six days into his cruise sick to his stomach and coughing up blood. Little did he realize that it would get worse, much worse. Vacation planning can no longer be taken for granted.

Panos asked if they could delay until the cruise reached Greece, where he had friends.

No, said the doctor.

They asked whether Boike could remain aboard since she wasn’t sick.

She couldn’t.

A ship’s nurse called their travel insurer, Travelex, and the couple was whisked off the ship into a Turkish ambulance in Kusadasi, a resort village in the Aegean Sea.

“I was in shock,” says Boike. “But I assumed they would call our emergency contacts or the U.S. Embassy for us.”

She assumed wrong. (Detroit Free Press)

If you think booking a trip is a simple task these days aboard a cruise ship, think again. In order to protect yourself it almost seems that one has to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” as if one was doing a closing on a home. (Read the rest of this eye opening story at The Detroit Free Press)