We Walked Past the Sign. We Shouldn't Have.
Twenty-one days across Japan and South Korea, one doctor's visit, and the travel insurance lesson we learned the hard way.
Elaine Brackin
4/2/20263 min read
We Walked Past the Sign. We Shouldn't Have.
Twenty-one days across Japan and South Korea, one doctor's visit, and the travel insurance lesson we learned the hard way.
There is a sign at Haneda Airport. We saw it the moment we landed, bleary from the flight, already pulling up the train schedule on our phones. It said something about medical costs. About how quickly they add up without coverage. About how you really ought to think about this before you need to.
We walked past it.
We had a credit card with some travel protection buried in the benefits. We'd never actually read the fine print, but it was there, and that felt like enough. We were experienced travelers. We had twenty-one days ahead of us across Japan and South Korea, Tokyo to Inuyama to Seoul and beyond. We had a plan. What we did not have was insurance worth reaching for if something went wrong.
Something went wrong.
Not dramatically. Not in the way that becomes a story you tell at dinner parties for years. But my body has a condition, a chronic one, that tends to find the least convenient moments. And somewhere between the train platforms and the temple stairs, between the bowls of ramen and the quiet streets of Inuyama, it found one.
We found a clinic after hours of research and calls. A taxi driver who spoke almost no English and somehow understood everything got us there. The doctor was thorough and kind. The care was genuinely good. We paid out of pocket, with a card, standing at a reception desk doing the yen-to-dollar math quietly in our heads while trying to look composed.
It wasn't catastrophic. But there is a particular quality to that feeling, paying for something urgent in a foreign currency, in a country where you cannot fully advocate for yourself, without any safety net beneath you. Not knowing whether the bill would be hundreds of dollars or thousands, and having no real way to find out until it was already in front of us. It stays with you.
We thought about the credit card. We thought about the process of actually using it, the documentation, the claims portal we'd never set up, the phone number we didn't have saved. Travel protection that lives in the fine print of a credit card agreement is not really protection. It is a feeling of protection. Those are different things.
After we got home, we found Faye.
What struck us first was how easy it was. Not easy in the way that things are designed to seem easy and then aren't. Actually easy. A quote in under sixty seconds. Plain language. No tiers to decode, no competing packages to compare. One straightforward plan you can shape to what you actually need. And an app that, once you're traveling, functions less like an insurance portal and more like a calm, competent friend who happens to know exactly what to do. I have recommended Faye to clients now, and what keeps coming back to me in their stories is a detail I didn't expect: the follow-up. Not just processing the claim and moving on, but checking in afterward. Asking how they were doing. That is not something you associate with insurance companies. It is something you associate with people who actually care, which turns out to be a meaningful distinction when you are far from home and not entirely fine.
When a flight is delayed or canceled, Faye tracks it and pays you directly. Not after a claim process. Directly, into a digital wallet you can use immediately. When something medical happens abroad, you have up to $250,000 in coverage. When you need a human at two in the morning in a foreign city, you get one. Not a bot reading from a script. A person.
We think about that sign at Haneda sometimes. The one we walked past. It wasn't trying to alarm us. It was just telling the truth about something we weren't ready to hear yet. We were the kind of travelers who thought preparation meant knowing which trains to take and which neighborhoods to stay in. It does mean those things. It also means something quieter and less glamorous: making sure that when your body or your plans betray you six thousand miles from home, you are not standing at a reception desk doing math you didn't expect to do.
We go back to Norway this year. We have already chosen our coverage on Faye. And yes, if you book through our link, we earn a small commission. It costs you nothing extra, and it genuinely helps us keep doing what we do here. We only ever point you toward things we use ourselves. This is one of them.