Claim to fame: Niche travel insurance puts a premium on peace of mind

Have you got this covered? Most people don’t.More than six out of 10 Americans traveled last year without any kind of insurance, per a survey from Upgraded Points.It’s an unsexy risk that makes us outliers in the global scene.

For example, 86% of Australians bought coverage for their big trips.And sure, these days, most fancy credit cards build in minimal travel insurance as part of their benefits, but there’s also a raft of niche products that are equally affordable and reassuring (just read the fine print, of course).Take breakup insurance.

It’s the brainchild of Annie Sloan of the Host Co., a company that offers back-end services to apartment rentals. “People are finally being offered insurance for the things they actually care about,” she said of her partnership with travel insurance company Faye.“It’s about removing the abstraction of what insurance is for.” It’s a canny repackaging of so-called CFAR, or Cancel for Any Reason insurance, that’s long been a staple in the biz.  If you opt into Sloan’s product on a booking via her platform — expect to pay around $100 for $1,000 of coverage — you can nix a trip up to 24 hours before you’re due to travel if you simply get a case of the icks.You can’t change the weather, but you can insure against it now.

Startups like Poncho, Sensible Weather and WeatherPromise offer affordable policies that can pay out if your sunny day on the links is wrecked by rain.JetBlue struck a corporate tie-up with WeatherPromise bundling it as an option for its vacation packages.And this spring, its Great Weather Guarantee for Jamaica offered a $500 payout this spring if the rain on a given trip exceeded a pre-determined level for that vacation.

It helped spike interest, per JetBlue, which saw bookings increase 18% year over year, even with reduced air capacity to the destination.Travel Inconvenience insurance from World Nomads works much the same way: Worried about that predicted El Niño winter le...