I mentioned something about airline credit and vouchers in my last post for my shortened Nieuw Statendam cruise, so I think that’s a good place to start talking about my next trip.

Our travel insurance company flew us home on Lufthansa last year. If possible, travel insurance companies don’t like to bring patients into the US at an airport other than their final destination because they don’t want you to have to go through immigration and customs and then re-check bags/go through security again. Jim learned that Lufthansa has a reputation for doing an excellent job with medical/repatriation flights, and I can vouch for that. Their reputation is well deserved.

We decided not to claim our unused airfare on our travel insurance. In our minds we had several things scheduled domestically starting in December and thought that would be a nice way to use the credit. We found out shortly after we got home that the credit could only be applied for a flight from Europe to the US, and had to be used by early August of 2026. Well, twist my arm. I certainly wasn’t going to let the flight credit go to waste, and if I had to go to Europe to use it then that’s just what I was going to do! I started researching, decided on a Celebrity Med cruise that fit our schedule and would get us to ports that are mostly new to us, and started planning! Remember, I was non-weight bearing most of the fall and spent most of my time at home, so booking travel gave me something fun to plan and look forward to.

All the details fell in place nicely. We paid for the cruise, planned and booked tours, and started getting excited. Not that I needed it, but it also gave me extra motivation for rehabbing my ankle. I had to be able to walk on cobblestones by the beginning of May.

In January Jim heard airfare for the spring/summer would be going up considerably and we decided to go ahead and buy plane tickets. That’s when we were hit with the sad realization that our nice United Polaris credit was really worth nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. The credit couldn’t be applied to a round trip, so the only way to use the credit was to purchase two one-way tickets. Since each of the one ways was almost the same price as a round trip it actually would have cost us more to use the voucher than to purchase new tickets!😳

We decided to go ahead with our plans. At that point I was too far into planning and we were both looking forward to the trip too much to cancel. That’s how our “low cost air” Mediterranean cruise ended up being anything but “low cost air” for us!

Lesson learned…find out what the fine print says. I keep telling myself that our insurance company would have used our existing tickets if they could, but it’s still irritating. Hopefully we’ll never have to leave a trip early like that again, but if we do I’ll certainly claim the value of the return tickets!