WASHINGTON — Life happens, and sometimes you need to cancel your travel plans to deal with issues closer to home.

But if you’ve already booked plane tickets, you could be out hundreds of dollars.

“It’s sort of like trying to buy fire insurance after the fire breaks out in the second-floor apartment,” Peter Greenberg, Travel Editor for CBS News, tells WTOP. “You have to buy insurance before there’s a known incident.”

Once incidents occur, some insurance companies will rewrite the policies in their favor. Therefore, trip cancellation interruption insurance is good to purchase, especially if you’ve invested a lot of money on plane tickets, Greenberg says.

However, he says, don’t buy insurance from the travel provider itself. There’s a chance the language in the policy won’t benefit you, Greenberg concludes.

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