Passport Dates / Travel Essentials

What losing my bag at 22 taught me about travel insurance

A true story, a counterintuitive rule, and what we tell every client before they board.

I was twenty-two and going to London for a photoshoot. The kind of trip that felt, at the time, like proof of something. Like the world was finally starting to take me seriously.

I had packed with intention. Not just clothes. The things you bring when a trip matters: the dress I'd been saving, the jacket I'd spent three months looking for, the shoes that were exactly right. Everything I owned that felt like me, compressed into one bag, because this was an important trip and I wanted to show up prepared.

The bag never came.

Not delayed. Not misdirected. Gone. The airline confirmed it with the particular blankness of people who have delivered this news many times, and I stood at the carousel long after the conveyor belt went still, doing the arithmetic that every traveler eventually does: what was in there, what it cost, what I could replace, and with what.

Here is what I learned, and what most people don't know until it's too late

I assumed the airline would pay something meaningful. I also assumed that the credit card I'd booked on would fill the gap. I was wrong on both counts, and the reason is a piece of international law most travelers have never heard of.

For domestic flights, airlines can be held liable for lost baggage up to $4,700 per passenger. For international flights, a different set of rules applies. Under the Montreal Convention, the international treaty governing airline liability, the maximum an airline owes you for a lost bag is currently capped at roughly $2,175, regardless of what was inside it.¹ It does not matter if you were carrying $4,000 worth of professional equipment or a wardrobe assembled over years. The cap is the cap.

What no one explains to you at twenty-two, standing at a baggage desk in a foreign airport, is that longer trip usually means more at stake, but the law gives you less. It is precisely the wrong way around, and it catches people every time.

My credit card offered minimal coverage. Barely enough to cover a few replacement items, nothing close to what was lost. I filed what I could, collected what little I was owed, and spent the first day of that trip shopping out of necessity instead of excitement.

"Longer trip usually means more at stake. But the international law gives you less. It is precisely the wrong way around."

What the numbers say now

That experience was personal. But it was not unusual. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2024 Air Travel Consumer Report, airlines posted a mishandled baggage rate of 0.55% for the full year, with the December rate climbing to 0.60% across 45.7 million bags handled in that month alone.²² And 1.4% of all flights were cancelled in 2024, a rate higher than the year before.³

What we use now, and what we recommend to clients

We travel with Faye. We also recommend it to our clients, and we have for a while now. Not because it is perfect. Because it works, and because we have seen what happens when travelers don't have something like it.

Faye was named a TIME Best Invention of 2025.⁴ The distinction that earned it that recognition is something we've noticed ourselves: when something goes wrong, it moves. If your bag is missing at midnight in a city you don't know, the app deposits money into a digital wallet immediately, so you can buy what you need without waiting weeks for a reimbursement check to arrive at home.⁵

The coverage itself is whole-trip: emergency medical up to $250,000, medical evacuation up to $500,000, trip cancellation, baggage loss, and 24/7 access to real people.⁶ The underwriters, United States Fire Insurance Company and Great American Insurance Group, are both rated A+ by A.M. Best.⁷ That last detail is the one we always mention to clients. Insurance is a promise. The rating tells you whether the company can keep it.

A word about the world right now

We get asked about this often. Travel has changed. The world is more complicated than it was, and people want to know what their coverage actually means in a climate of conflict.

Here is what is true, and we believe in telling you the true version: like virtually all travel insurance policies, Faye excludes losses caused directly by acts of war.⁸ It also does not offer coverage to certain high-risk destinations where conditions make coverage impossible to underwrite, including active conflict zones.⁹ This is standard across the industry, and we think it matters that you know it.

What Faye does offer, and what most credit cards do not, is $100,000 in non-medical evacuation coverage, which applies when you need to get out of a destination quickly due to a sudden natural disaster or a security situation that was not foreseeable when you booked.¹⁰ That is a meaningful distinction. Unexpected things happen in places that were considered perfectly safe when you purchased your policy. That coverage exists for exactly those moments.

A note on how this works

We are affiliated with Faye through Fora Travel, and if you book through our link, we receive a commission, but the price remains the same for you. We want you to know that. We also want you to know it is not why we recommend it. We recommend it because we use it ourselves on every trip, and because when our clients have needed it, it has been there. Those two things are what matter to us.

Sources

1. U.S. Department of Transportation, Lost, Delayed, or Damaged Baggage. transportation.gov

2. U.S. Department of Transportation, Air Travel Consumer Report: December 2024 and Full Year 2024. transportation.gov

3. Ibid.

4. TIME, Best Inventions of 2025, Faye. time.com

5. TIME, Best Inventions of 2025, Faye. time.com

6. Fora Travel, Meet Faye, Fora's Preferred Travel Insurance Partner. foratravel.com

7. Faye Travel Insurance FAQ. withfaye.com

8. NerdWallet, Faye Travel Insurance Review. nerdwallet.com

9. Insurify, Faye Travel Insurance Review. insurify.com

10. Fora Travel, Meet Faye, Fora's Preferred Travel Insurance Partner. foratravel.com