Life insurance for travel agents

The coverage nobody gave you

Most employed people have some life insurance through work and never think about it. Independent agents, host-affiliated agents, and agency owners have none of that by default. If your household depends on your commission income, the amount of coverage protecting it is whatever you decided to buy.

Term insurance is the straightforward version — a fixed amount for a fixed number of years, at a fixed price. It is the least complicated and least expensive way to cover the years where the loss of your income would actually change your family's life: while there is a mortgage, while there are children at home, while the business is still building.

If you own the agency with someone

Two partners in an agency have a problem that has nothing to do with their families. If one of them dies, the survivor is suddenly in business with an estate — often a spouse who has no interest in running a travel agency and a strong interest in being paid out.

A buy-sell agreement settles in advance what happens: the surviving owner buys the departing owner's share, at a price the agreement sets. Life insurance is what funds it, so the money to complete that purchase exists at the moment it is needed rather than having to come out of the business.

Key person, briefly

If the agency would lose meaningful revenue because one particular person is gone — the one with the supplier relationships, the one every repeat client asks for — key person coverage is the business buying a policy on that person, payable to the business, to absorb the disruption while it rebuilds.