{"id":45680,"topic":"ai","source":"Forbes","title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","url_hash":"66fb801cc6c98ea2463e2844c693052aa770076e","author":"","summary":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated Forbes","content":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.\nDavis had travel insurance, which covered her flight delay. But the claims process was complicated. Her insurance company asked for something that no longer existed: her original boarding passes.\nWhy not generate the missing boarding passes using AI? Davis says she was never tempted, for several reasons. First, as an experienced travel advisor, she knows the rules. Faking a document is a big no-no.\nAnd second, her husband was a criminal defense attorney for 30 years. \"I have no interest in needing to hire him for a fraud case,\" she says.\nBut Davis understands why travelers would manufacture receipts, an increasingly common problem for travel insurance companies. Sometimes, the demands of an insurance carrier can leave you \"utterly frustrated,\" she says.\nUsing AI for a travel insurance claim is almost too easy. Creating AI-generated receipts used to require an expert forger. Now it takes about 30 seconds to type a sentence into an app, and the results look authentic.\nIn a Verisk study released this year, 99 percent of insurers say they've already run into manipulated or AI-altered documentation, and 36 percent of consumers say they'd consider editing a claim photo or document, a number that climbs to 55 percent among Gen Z.\nAnd that brings up a question that anyone with a travel insurance claim will have to answer this summer: How do you use AI? Is it ever OK to create a document—even one that should exist but doesn't?\nWhy travel insurance claims fail\nMost travelers are honest about their claims. At Squaremouth, a travel insurance site, doctored documentation and fake travel insurance receipts turn up on less than 1 percent, says Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations.\n\"Beyond missing documentation, the most common reason for a claim to be denied is that a traveler didn't fully read their policy and assumed they were covered in a situation where they weren't,\" she says.\nScott Fleming, president of Aon Affinity Travel Practice, says denials happen \"when there's a disconnect between what the traveler thinks the policy covers and what that policy actually covers.\"\nThe fix: Keep everything, he says. Don't toss a receipt, because it can be the difference between reimbursement and eating the loss.\n\"One of the most common reasons travelers encounter challenges during the claims process is not having the documentation needed to support a covered loss,\" says Brandon Bates, president of the US Travel Insurance Association. \"Coverage and claim requirements vary by policy, so travelers should understand how their plan works before they depart.\"\nCorey Pollard, a former insurance defense attorney who now runs a law firm in Richmond, Va., separates a claim into questions most people blur together. Did something go wrong? Do the documents prove it? Is the reason it went wrong actually covered?\n\"Most claimants will only reply to the first,\" he says. The insurance company is busy with the other two.\nHow insurers catch AI-generated fake receipts\nSo how good are the fakes?\n\"AI can make convincing documents,\" admits Alex Adekola, a licensed independent adjuster and founder of ReadyAdjuster.\nIt's so convincing that insurance companies can't catch a forgery with just fancy software. They catch it when one document doesn't fit the rest of the file. The tell is an invoice in the wrong format, or a receipt out of order.\n\"AI can't make a fake consistent with the rest of the claim when the whole file is reviewed,\" says Adekola.\nCall it the corroboration test: Where else should this transaction validate, and does it? AI has gotten good at producing legitimate-looking documents. It can't answer that second question.\nChristian Espinosa, a digital forensics specialist, says carriers already run automated checks for metadata inconsistencies—that's the data attached to files like images and documents.\n\"An AI-generated invoice does not just get you your claim denied,\" he says. \"It is flagged, investigated and may be subject to criminal review.\"\nJames Page, senior vice president and head of operations at Travel Guard, says the carrier now fights AI with AI.\n\"We have AI tools that can look at documents to tell us whether they have been manipulated by AI,\" he says. \"But like any other tool, AI tools need to be consistently upgraded to keep up with fraud methods.\"\nTyler Rodgers, president of the investigation firm Privin Network, has watched the corroboration test collapse a claim in a single step. His team once pulled the metadata on a submitted receipt and found the file had been modified three weeks after the loss it supposedly documented.\n\"Based on that one piece of information, we were able to deny the claim and initiate a fraud investigation,\" he says. He's seen civil disputes turn criminal over one altered hotel invoice.\nThe real cost of travel insurance fraud\nThe downside runs well past a denied claim. Submitting knowingly false documentation is travel insurance fraud, a crime in every state.\nKarisa Cernera, vice president of claims and compliance at Redpoint Travel Protection, says a suspicious claim doesn't stay with a regular adjuster.\n\"If a claim raises potential red flags, it may be referred to a special investigation unit,\" she says. \"These teams investigate suspected insurance fraud and work closely with law enforcement and regulatory authorities where appropriate.\"\nThose records follow a person for years. Insurance companies put fraudsters on a do-not-sell list, barred from buying through the company again.\nCernera's advice for filing a successful claim? Don't cheat.\n\"Be honest, be organized, and report incidents as soon as they happen,\" she says.\nWhere can AI help you with your travel insurance claim?\nAI isn't the problem. It's how you use it.\nMost travel insurance policies are written in gibberish. Smart travelers use AI to translate their policies into English. They paste in the text of the dense PDF and ask which perils are covered and which exclusions apply. Then they confirm the results with their insurance company.\nYou can also use AI as an organizational tool. A large language model can help you build a detailed timeline of the disruption, sort your receipts and emails into one file, and draft the who, what, where and how that the claim form asks for. Use it to write the cover note that explains what's missing and why. If your paperwork is in another language, use it to translate the doctor's report or the foreign receipt so an adjuster can read it.\nMelanie Warner, a frequent traveler who runs a publishing company, says AI can be helpful in identifying what's required to file a successful claim.\n\"I often use AI to research what information I need to get a claim approved,\" she says.\nHow to file a successful claim the right way\nInsurance experts say you shouldn't have to resort to faking an invoice to file a successful insurance claim. Here's how.\nCall before you spend. The moment a trip goes sideways, contact your insurance company. \"Call their policy's 24/7 emergency assistance line the moment an incident occurs,\" says Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. The call also opens the claim, so the carrier has a record from day one.\nCapture it live. Screenshot the airline app before the gate agent changes anything. Get the doctor's note the same day, not a week later. Use your phone to photograph every receipt.\nFeed the corroboration test. Build a file that checks out against outside records: card statements, emails with real headers, a police or hospital report. A genuine transaction lives in more than one place, so hand the adjuster those places.\nName the gap, don't fill it. Missing a document? Say so, and ask what alternative proof the insurer accepts. Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the better move is to contact the insurance company and ask \"rather than trying to reconstruct something after the fact.\" Enclose a short dated note spelling out what's missing, why, and what you're sending in its place. For small-dollar items, some carriers will accept a signed affidavit. \"In the case of small dollar items, we can often accept an affidavit from a policyholder that outlines their expenses even if they don't have all the receipts,\" Page says. An acknowledged hole may survive the claims process. An invented patch probably won't.\nSee a doctor, even for a sniffle. If an illness might cost you a flight or a prepaid tour, get examined, even when you'd rather ride it out in your hotel room. \"If you are going to miss a flight or are unable to use a prepaid travel service due to illness, you should seek professional medical assistance, even if you do not think it is necessary,\" says Susan Sherren, founder of the travel agency Couture Trips. \"Not everyone cares if you have a cold and an upset stomach and need to cancel your tour. Without proper documentation, your claim for a missed tour or flight may be denied.\" A provider who issues a proof-of-care invoice gives you the paper an adjuster needs.\nSubmit a complete claim. Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA, says complete, accurate paperwork filed correctly the first time moves the fastest. \"Submit complete and accurate information from the start,\" he advises. Resubmitting incomplete claims can slow down the process.\nLet the paperwork do the talking\nI've filed my share of travel insurance claims from odd corners of the world, and the winning ones are boring. Every number has a second home, in an email, on a credit card statement, in a letter on hotel letterhead.\nAI can draw you a receipt so clean it belongs in a frame, and it will still lose to a smudged card statement an adjuster can verify with one phone call.\nDavis, the travel advisor, finally got her claim approved.\n\"The claim was paid after multiple resubmissions and letters explaining that the requested documents did not exist,\" she says.\nThat's the fight worth having, with your insurer, on the record. Not with a text-to-image app that's about to get you into legal trouble. If your paperwork has a hole, say so.\nThere are legitimate reasons to use AI during your travel insurance claim. Generating fake travel insurance receipts isn't one of them.","image_url":"https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/6a63f086f4a4bd8d1cd208d5/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-07-25T00:15:05+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","cluster_id":null,"extract_retries":0,"extract_error":null,"contract_version":"news_item.v1","format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1","dedup_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}},"news_item":{"id":45680,"canonical_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","source_url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","source_name":"Forbes","author":null,"published_at":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"rss_summary":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated Forbes","full_text":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.\nDavis had travel insurance, which covered her flight delay. But the claims process was complicated. Her insurance company asked for something that no longer existed: her original boarding passes.\nWhy not generate the missing boarding passes using AI? Davis says she was never tempted, for several reasons. First, as an experienced travel advisor, she knows the rules. Faking a document is a big no-no.\nAnd second, her husband was a criminal defense attorney for 30 years. \"I have no interest in needing to hire him for a fraud case,\" she says.\nBut Davis understands why travelers would manufacture receipts, an increasingly common problem for travel insurance companies. Sometimes, the demands of an insurance carrier can leave you \"utterly frustrated,\" she says.\nUsing AI for a travel insurance claim is almost too easy. Creating AI-generated receipts used to require an expert forger. Now it takes about 30 seconds to type a sentence into an app, and the results look authentic.\nIn a Verisk study released this year, 99 percent of insurers say they've already run into manipulated or AI-altered documentation, and 36 percent of consumers say they'd consider editing a claim photo or document, a number that climbs to 55 percent among Gen Z.\nAnd that brings up a question that anyone with a travel insurance claim will have to answer this summer: How do you use AI? Is it ever OK to create a document—even one that should exist but doesn't?\nWhy travel insurance claims fail\nMost travelers are honest about their claims. At Squaremouth, a travel insurance site, doctored documentation and fake travel insurance receipts turn up on less than 1 percent, says Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations.\n\"Beyond missing documentation, the most common reason for a claim to be denied is that a traveler didn't fully read their policy and assumed they were covered in a situation where they weren't,\" she says.\nScott Fleming, president of Aon Affinity Travel Practice, says denials happen \"when there's a disconnect between what the traveler thinks the policy covers and what that policy actually covers.\"\nThe fix: Keep everything, he says. Don't toss a receipt, because it can be the difference between reimbursement and eating the loss.\n\"One of the most common reasons travelers encounter challenges during the claims process is not having the documentation needed to support a covered loss,\" says Brandon Bates, president of the US Travel Insurance Association. \"Coverage and claim requirements vary by policy, so travelers should understand how their plan works before they depart.\"\nCorey Pollard, a former insurance defense attorney who now runs a law firm in Richmond, Va., separates a claim into questions most people blur together. Did something go wrong? Do the documents prove it? Is the reason it went wrong actually covered?\n\"Most claimants will only reply to the first,\" he says. The insurance company is busy with the other two.\nHow insurers catch AI-generated fake receipts\nSo how good are the fakes?\n\"AI can make convincing documents,\" admits Alex Adekola, a licensed independent adjuster and founder of ReadyAdjuster.\nIt's so convincing that insurance companies can't catch a forgery with just fancy software. They catch it when one document doesn't fit the rest of the file. The tell is an invoice in the wrong format, or a receipt out of order.\n\"AI can't make a fake consistent with the rest of the claim when the whole file is reviewed,\" says Adekola.\nCall it the corroboration test: Where else should this transaction validate, and does it? AI has gotten good at producing legitimate-looking documents. It can't answer that second question.\nChristian Espinosa, a digital forensics specialist, says carriers already run automated checks for metadata inconsistencies—that's the data attached to files like images and documents.\n\"An AI-generated invoice does not just get you your claim denied,\" he says. \"It is flagged, investigated and may be subject to criminal review.\"\nJames Page, senior vice president and head of operations at Travel Guard, says the carrier now fights AI with AI.\n\"We have AI tools that can look at documents to tell us whether they have been manipulated by AI,\" he says. \"But like any other tool, AI tools need to be consistently upgraded to keep up with fraud methods.\"\nTyler Rodgers, president of the investigation firm Privin Network, has watched the corroboration test collapse a claim in a single step. His team once pulled the metadata on a submitted receipt and found the file had been modified three weeks after the loss it supposedly documented.\n\"Based on that one piece of information, we were able to deny the claim and initiate a fraud investigation,\" he says. He's seen civil disputes turn criminal over one altered hotel invoice.\nThe real cost of travel insurance fraud\nThe downside runs well past a denied claim. Submitting knowingly false documentation is travel insurance fraud, a crime in every state.\nKarisa Cernera, vice president of claims and compliance at Redpoint Travel Protection, says a suspicious claim doesn't stay with a regular adjuster.\n\"If a claim raises potential red flags, it may be referred to a special investigation unit,\" she says. \"These teams investigate suspected insurance fraud and work closely with law enforcement and regulatory authorities where appropriate.\"\nThose records follow a person for years. Insurance companies put fraudsters on a do-not-sell list, barred from buying through the company again.\nCernera's advice for filing a successful claim? Don't cheat.\n\"Be honest, be organized, and report incidents as soon as they happen,\" she says.\nWhere can AI help you with your travel insurance claim?\nAI isn't the problem. It's how you use it.\nMost travel insurance policies are written in gibberish. Smart travelers use AI to translate their policies into English. They paste in the text of the dense PDF and ask which perils are covered and which exclusions apply. Then they confirm the results with their insurance company.\nYou can also use AI as an organizational tool. A large language model can help you build a detailed timeline of the disruption, sort your receipts and emails into one file, and draft the who, what, where and how that the claim form asks for. Use it to write the cover note that explains what's missing and why. If your paperwork is in another language, use it to translate the doctor's report or the foreign receipt so an adjuster can read it.\nMelanie Warner, a frequent traveler who runs a publishing company, says AI can be helpful in identifying what's required to file a successful claim.\n\"I often use AI to research what information I need to get a claim approved,\" she says.\nHow to file a successful claim the right way\nInsurance experts say you shouldn't have to resort to faking an invoice to file a successful insurance claim. Here's how.\nCall before you spend. The moment a trip goes sideways, contact your insurance company. \"Call their policy's 24/7 emergency assistance line the moment an incident occurs,\" says Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. The call also opens the claim, so the carrier has a record from day one.\nCapture it live. Screenshot the airline app before the gate agent changes anything. Get the doctor's note the same day, not a week later. Use your phone to photograph every receipt.\nFeed the corroboration test. Build a file that checks out against outside records: card statements, emails with real headers, a police or hospital report. A genuine transaction lives in more than one place, so hand the adjuster those places.\nName the gap, don't fill it. Missing a document? Say so, and ask what alternative proof the insurer accepts. Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the better move is to contact the insurance company and ask \"rather than trying to reconstruct something after the fact.\" Enclose a short dated note spelling out what's missing, why, and what you're sending in its place. For small-dollar items, some carriers will accept a signed affidavit. \"In the case of small dollar items, we can often accept an affidavit from a policyholder that outlines their expenses even if they don't have all the receipts,\" Page says. An acknowledged hole may survive the claims process. An invented patch probably won't.\nSee a doctor, even for a sniffle. If an illness might cost you a flight or a prepaid tour, get examined, even when you'd rather ride it out in your hotel room. \"If you are going to miss a flight or are unable to use a prepaid travel service due to illness, you should seek professional medical assistance, even if you do not think it is necessary,\" says Susan Sherren, founder of the travel agency Couture Trips. \"Not everyone cares if you have a cold and an upset stomach and need to cancel your tour. Without proper documentation, your claim for a missed tour or flight may be denied.\" A provider who issues a proof-of-care invoice gives you the paper an adjuster needs.\nSubmit a complete claim. Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA, says complete, accurate paperwork filed correctly the first time moves the fastest. \"Submit complete and accurate information from the start,\" he advises. Resubmitting incomplete claims can slow down the process.\nLet the paperwork do the talking\nI've filed my share of travel insurance claims from odd corners of the world, and the winning ones are boring. Every number has a second home, in an email, on a credit card statement, in a letter on hotel letterhead.\nAI can draw you a receipt so clean it belongs in a frame, and it will still lose to a smudged card statement an adjuster can verify with one phone call.\nDavis, the travel advisor, finally got her claim approved.\n\"The claim was paid after multiple resubmissions and letters explaining that the requested documents did not exist,\" she says.\nThat's the fight worth having, with your insurer, on the record. Not with a text-to-image app that's about to get you into legal trouble. If your paperwork has a hole, say so.\nThere are legitimate reasons to use AI during your travel insurance claim. Generating fake travel insurance receipts isn't one of them.","excerpt":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","summary":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","content":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.\nDavis had travel insurance, which covered her flight delay. But the claims process was complicated. Her insurance company asked for something that no longer existed: her original boarding passes.\nWhy not generate the missing boarding passes using AI? Davis says she was never tempted, for several reasons. First, as an experienced travel advisor, she knows the rules. Faking a document is a big no-no.\nAnd second, her husband was a criminal defense attorney for 30 years. \"I have no interest in needing to hire him for a fraud case,\" she says.\nBut Davis understands why travelers would manufacture receipts, an increasingly common problem for travel insurance companies. Sometimes, the demands of an insurance carrier can leave you \"utterly frustrated,\" she says.\nUsing AI for a travel insurance claim is almost too easy. Creating AI-generated receipts used to require an expert forger. Now it takes about 30 seconds to type a sentence into an app, and the results look authentic.\nIn a Verisk study released this year, 99 percent of insurers say they've already run into manipulated or AI-altered documentation, and 36 percent of consumers say they'd consider editing a claim photo or document, a number that climbs to 55 percent among Gen Z.\nAnd that brings up a question that anyone with a travel insurance claim will have to answer this summer: How do you use AI? Is it ever OK to create a document—even one that should exist but doesn't?\nWhy travel insurance claims fail\nMost travelers are honest about their claims. At Squaremouth, a travel insurance site, doctored documentation and fake travel insurance receipts turn up on less than 1 percent, says Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations.\n\"Beyond missing documentation, the most common reason for a claim to be denied is that a traveler didn't fully read their policy and assumed they were covered in a situation where they weren't,\" she says.\nScott Fleming, president of Aon Affinity Travel Practice, says denials happen \"when there's a disconnect between what the traveler thinks the policy covers and what that policy actually covers.\"\nThe fix: Keep everything, he says. Don't toss a receipt, because it can be the difference between reimbursement and eating the loss.\n\"One of the most common reasons travelers encounter challenges during the claims process is not having the documentation needed to support a covered loss,\" says Brandon Bates, president of the US Travel Insurance Association. \"Coverage and claim requirements vary by policy, so travelers should understand how their plan works before they depart.\"\nCorey Pollard, a former insurance defense attorney who now runs a law firm in Richmond, Va., separates a claim into questions most people blur together. Did something go wrong? Do the documents prove it? Is the reason it went wrong actually covered?\n\"Most claimants will only reply to the first,\" he says. The insurance company is busy with the other two.\nHow insurers catch AI-generated fake receipts\nSo how good are the fakes?\n\"AI can make convincing documents,\" admits Alex Adekola, a licensed independent adjuster and founder of ReadyAdjuster.\nIt's so convincing that insurance companies can't catch a forgery with just fancy software. They catch it when one document doesn't fit the rest of the file. The tell is an invoice in the wrong format, or a receipt out of order.\n\"AI can't make a fake consistent with the rest of the claim when the whole file is reviewed,\" says Adekola.\nCall it the corroboration test: Where else should this transaction validate, and does it? AI has gotten good at producing legitimate-looking documents. It can't answer that second question.\nChristian Espinosa, a digital forensics specialist, says carriers already run automated checks for metadata inconsistencies—that's the data attached to files like images and documents.\n\"An AI-generated invoice does not just get you your claim denied,\" he says. \"It is flagged, investigated and may be subject to criminal review.\"\nJames Page, senior vice president and head of operations at Travel Guard, says the carrier now fights AI with AI.\n\"We have AI tools that can look at documents to tell us whether they have been manipulated by AI,\" he says. \"But like any other tool, AI tools need to be consistently upgraded to keep up with fraud methods.\"\nTyler Rodgers, president of the investigation firm Privin Network, has watched the corroboration test collapse a claim in a single step. His team once pulled the metadata on a submitted receipt and found the file had been modified three weeks after the loss it supposedly documented.\n\"Based on that one piece of information, we were able to deny the claim and initiate a fraud investigation,\" he says. He's seen civil disputes turn criminal over one altered hotel invoice.\nThe real cost of travel insurance fraud\nThe downside runs well past a denied claim. Submitting knowingly false documentation is travel insurance fraud, a crime in every state.\nKarisa Cernera, vice president of claims and compliance at Redpoint Travel Protection, says a suspicious claim doesn't stay with a regular adjuster.\n\"If a claim raises potential red flags, it may be referred to a special investigation unit,\" she says. \"These teams investigate suspected insurance fraud and work closely with law enforcement and regulatory authorities where appropriate.\"\nThose records follow a person for years. Insurance companies put fraudsters on a do-not-sell list, barred from buying through the company again.\nCernera's advice for filing a successful claim? Don't cheat.\n\"Be honest, be organized, and report incidents as soon as they happen,\" she says.\nWhere can AI help you with your travel insurance claim?\nAI isn't the problem. It's how you use it.\nMost travel insurance policies are written in gibberish. Smart travelers use AI to translate their policies into English. They paste in the text of the dense PDF and ask which perils are covered and which exclusions apply. Then they confirm the results with their insurance company.\nYou can also use AI as an organizational tool. A large language model can help you build a detailed timeline of the disruption, sort your receipts and emails into one file, and draft the who, what, where and how that the claim form asks for. Use it to write the cover note that explains what's missing and why. If your paperwork is in another language, use it to translate the doctor's report or the foreign receipt so an adjuster can read it.\nMelanie Warner, a frequent traveler who runs a publishing company, says AI can be helpful in identifying what's required to file a successful claim.\n\"I often use AI to research what information I need to get a claim approved,\" she says.\nHow to file a successful claim the right way\nInsurance experts say you shouldn't have to resort to faking an invoice to file a successful insurance claim. Here's how.\nCall before you spend. The moment a trip goes sideways, contact your insurance company. \"Call their policy's 24/7 emergency assistance line the moment an incident occurs,\" says Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. The call also opens the claim, so the carrier has a record from day one.\nCapture it live. Screenshot the airline app before the gate agent changes anything. Get the doctor's note the same day, not a week later. Use your phone to photograph every receipt.\nFeed the corroboration test. Build a file that checks out against outside records: card statements, emails with real headers, a police or hospital report. A genuine transaction lives in more than one place, so hand the adjuster those places.\nName the gap, don't fill it. Missing a document? Say so, and ask what alternative proof the insurer accepts. Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the better move is to contact the insurance company and ask \"rather than trying to reconstruct something after the fact.\" Enclose a short dated note spelling out what's missing, why, and what you're sending in its place. For small-dollar items, some carriers will accept a signed affidavit. \"In the case of small dollar items, we can often accept an affidavit from a policyholder that outlines their expenses even if they don't have all the receipts,\" Page says. An acknowledged hole may survive the claims process. An invented patch probably won't.\nSee a doctor, even for a sniffle. If an illness might cost you a flight or a prepaid tour, get examined, even when you'd rather ride it out in your hotel room. \"If you are going to miss a flight or are unable to use a prepaid travel service due to illness, you should seek professional medical assistance, even if you do not think it is necessary,\" says Susan Sherren, founder of the travel agency Couture Trips. \"Not everyone cares if you have a cold and an upset stomach and need to cancel your tour. Without proper documentation, your claim for a missed tour or flight may be denied.\" A provider who issues a proof-of-care invoice gives you the paper an adjuster needs.\nSubmit a complete claim. Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA, says complete, accurate paperwork filed correctly the first time moves the fastest. \"Submit complete and accurate information from the start,\" he advises. Resubmitting incomplete claims can slow down the process.\nLet the paperwork do the talking\nI've filed my share of travel insurance claims from odd corners of the world, and the winning ones are boring. Every number has a second home, in an email, on a credit card statement, in a letter on hotel letterhead.\nAI can draw you a receipt so clean it belongs in a frame, and it will still lose to a smudged card statement an adjuster can verify with one phone call.\nDavis, the travel advisor, finally got her claim approved.\n\"The claim was paid after multiple resubmissions and letters explaining that the requested documents did not exist,\" she says.\nThat's the fight worth having, with your insurer, on the record. Not with a text-to-image app that's about to get you into legal trouble. If your paperwork has a hole, say so.\nThere are legitimate reasons to use AI during your travel insurance claim. Generating fake travel insurance receipts isn't one of them.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/45680","export_markdown":"/api/items/45680/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/45680/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/"},"formats":{"full":{"id":45680,"title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","source":"Forbes","author":null,"published_at":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","full_text":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.\nDavis had travel insurance, which covered her flight delay. But the claims process was complicated. Her insurance company asked for something that no longer existed: her original boarding passes.\nWhy not generate the missing boarding passes using AI? Davis says she was never tempted, for several reasons. First, as an experienced travel advisor, she knows the rules. Faking a document is a big no-no.\nAnd second, her husband was a criminal defense attorney for 30 years. \"I have no interest in needing to hire him for a fraud case,\" she says.\nBut Davis understands why travelers would manufacture receipts, an increasingly common problem for travel insurance companies. Sometimes, the demands of an insurance carrier can leave you \"utterly frustrated,\" she says.\nUsing AI for a travel insurance claim is almost too easy. Creating AI-generated receipts used to require an expert forger. Now it takes about 30 seconds to type a sentence into an app, and the results look authentic.\nIn a Verisk study released this year, 99 percent of insurers say they've already run into manipulated or AI-altered documentation, and 36 percent of consumers say they'd consider editing a claim photo or document, a number that climbs to 55 percent among Gen Z.\nAnd that brings up a question that anyone with a travel insurance claim will have to answer this summer: How do you use AI? Is it ever OK to create a document—even one that should exist but doesn't?\nWhy travel insurance claims fail\nMost travelers are honest about their claims. At Squaremouth, a travel insurance site, doctored documentation and fake travel insurance receipts turn up on less than 1 percent, says Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations.\n\"Beyond missing documentation, the most common reason for a claim to be denied is that a traveler didn't fully read their policy and assumed they were covered in a situation where they weren't,\" she says.\nScott Fleming, president of Aon Affinity Travel Practice, says denials happen \"when there's a disconnect between what the traveler thinks the policy covers and what that policy actually covers.\"\nThe fix: Keep everything, he says. Don't toss a receipt, because it can be the difference between reimbursement and eating the loss.\n\"One of the most common reasons travelers encounter challenges during the claims process is not having the documentation needed to support a covered loss,\" says Brandon Bates, president of the US Travel Insurance Association. \"Coverage and claim requirements vary by policy, so travelers should understand how their plan works before they depart.\"\nCorey Pollard, a former insurance defense attorney who now runs a law firm in Richmond, Va., separates a claim into questions most people blur together. Did something go wrong? Do the documents prove it? Is the reason it went wrong actually covered?\n\"Most claimants will only reply to the first,\" he says. The insurance company is busy with the other two.\nHow insurers catch AI-generated fake receipts\nSo how good are the fakes?\n\"AI can make convincing documents,\" admits Alex Adekola, a licensed independent adjuster and founder of ReadyAdjuster.\nIt's so convincing that insurance companies can't catch a forgery with just fancy software. They catch it when one document doesn't fit the rest of the file. The tell is an invoice in the wrong format, or a receipt out of order.\n\"AI can't make a fake consistent with the rest of the claim when the whole file is reviewed,\" says Adekola.\nCall it the corroboration test: Where else should this transaction validate, and does it? AI has gotten good at producing legitimate-looking documents. It can't answer that second question.\nChristian Espinosa, a digital forensics specialist, says carriers already run automated checks for metadata inconsistencies—that's the data attached to files like images and documents.\n\"An AI-generated invoice does not just get you your claim denied,\" he says. \"It is flagged, investigated and may be subject to criminal review.\"\nJames Page, senior vice president and head of operations at Travel Guard, says the carrier now fights AI with AI.\n\"We have AI tools that can look at documents to tell us whether they have been manipulated by AI,\" he says. \"But like any other tool, AI tools need to be consistently upgraded to keep up with fraud methods.\"\nTyler Rodgers, president of the investigation firm Privin Network, has watched the corroboration test collapse a claim in a single step. His team once pulled the metadata on a submitted receipt and found the file had been modified three weeks after the loss it supposedly documented.\n\"Based on that one piece of information, we were able to deny the claim and initiate a fraud investigation,\" he says. He's seen civil disputes turn criminal over one altered hotel invoice.\nThe real cost of travel insurance fraud\nThe downside runs well past a denied claim. Submitting knowingly false documentation is travel insurance fraud, a crime in every state.\nKarisa Cernera, vice president of claims and compliance at Redpoint Travel Protection, says a suspicious claim doesn't stay with a regular adjuster.\n\"If a claim raises potential red flags, it may be referred to a special investigation unit,\" she says. \"These teams investigate suspected insurance fraud and work closely with law enforcement and regulatory authorities where appropriate.\"\nThose records follow a person for years. Insurance companies put fraudsters on a do-not-sell list, barred from buying through the company again.\nCernera's advice for filing a successful claim? Don't cheat.\n\"Be honest, be organized, and report incidents as soon as they happen,\" she says.\nWhere can AI help you with your travel insurance claim?\nAI isn't the problem. It's how you use it.\nMost travel insurance policies are written in gibberish. Smart travelers use AI to translate their policies into English. They paste in the text of the dense PDF and ask which perils are covered and which exclusions apply. Then they confirm the results with their insurance company.\nYou can also use AI as an organizational tool. A large language model can help you build a detailed timeline of the disruption, sort your receipts and emails into one file, and draft the who, what, where and how that the claim form asks for. Use it to write the cover note that explains what's missing and why. If your paperwork is in another language, use it to translate the doctor's report or the foreign receipt so an adjuster can read it.\nMelanie Warner, a frequent traveler who runs a publishing company, says AI can be helpful in identifying what's required to file a successful claim.\n\"I often use AI to research what information I need to get a claim approved,\" she says.\nHow to file a successful claim the right way\nInsurance experts say you shouldn't have to resort to faking an invoice to file a successful insurance claim. Here's how.\nCall before you spend. The moment a trip goes sideways, contact your insurance company. \"Call their policy's 24/7 emergency assistance line the moment an incident occurs,\" says Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. The call also opens the claim, so the carrier has a record from day one.\nCapture it live. Screenshot the airline app before the gate agent changes anything. Get the doctor's note the same day, not a week later. Use your phone to photograph every receipt.\nFeed the corroboration test. Build a file that checks out against outside records: card statements, emails with real headers, a police or hospital report. A genuine transaction lives in more than one place, so hand the adjuster those places.\nName the gap, don't fill it. Missing a document? Say so, and ask what alternative proof the insurer accepts. Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the better move is to contact the insurance company and ask \"rather than trying to reconstruct something after the fact.\" Enclose a short dated note spelling out what's missing, why, and what you're sending in its place. For small-dollar items, some carriers will accept a signed affidavit. \"In the case of small dollar items, we can often accept an affidavit from a policyholder that outlines their expenses even if they don't have all the receipts,\" Page says. An acknowledged hole may survive the claims process. An invented patch probably won't.\nSee a doctor, even for a sniffle. If an illness might cost you a flight or a prepaid tour, get examined, even when you'd rather ride it out in your hotel room. \"If you are going to miss a flight or are unable to use a prepaid travel service due to illness, you should seek professional medical assistance, even if you do not think it is necessary,\" says Susan Sherren, founder of the travel agency Couture Trips. \"Not everyone cares if you have a cold and an upset stomach and need to cancel your tour. Without proper documentation, your claim for a missed tour or flight may be denied.\" A provider who issues a proof-of-care invoice gives you the paper an adjuster needs.\nSubmit a complete claim. Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA, says complete, accurate paperwork filed correctly the first time moves the fastest. \"Submit complete and accurate information from the start,\" he advises. Resubmitting incomplete claims can slow down the process.\nLet the paperwork do the talking\nI've filed my share of travel insurance claims from odd corners of the world, and the winning ones are boring. Every number has a second home, in an email, on a credit card statement, in a letter on hotel letterhead.\nAI can draw you a receipt so clean it belongs in a frame, and it will still lose to a smudged card statement an adjuster can verify with one phone call.\nDavis, the travel advisor, finally got her claim approved.\n\"The claim was paid after multiple resubmissions and letters explaining that the requested documents did not exist,\" she says.\nThat's the fight worth having, with your insurer, on the record. Not with a text-to-image app that's about to get you into legal trouble. If your paperwork has a hole, say so.\nThere are legitimate reasons to use AI during your travel insurance claim. Generating fake travel insurance receipts isn't one of them.","reading_time_min":9,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}},"actions":{"read":"/item/45680","export_markdown":"/api/items/45680/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/45680/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/"}},"digest":{"id":45680,"title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","source":"Forbes","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","excerpt":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","quality_bucket":"high","quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","reading_time_min":9,"cluster_id":null},"card":{"display_title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","subtitle":"Forbes · 2026-07-24","summary":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/45680","original":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"Can AI Help You Win A Travel Insurance Claim? It’s Complicated - Forbes","url":"https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","summary":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.","source":"Forbes","date":"2026-07-24T23:16:24+00:00","content":"Somewhere over the Atlantic, Kimberly Davis' recent flight from Charlotte to Rome made a U-turn after encountering a mechanical problem. Her airline rebooked her on a flight the next day, but by then she'd already lost a prepaid hotel night and a private tour.\nDavis had travel insurance, which covered her flight delay. But the claims process was complicated. Her insurance company asked for something that no longer existed: her original boarding passes.\nWhy not generate the missing boarding passes using AI? Davis says she was never tempted, for several reasons. First, as an experienced travel advisor, she knows the rules. Faking a document is a big no-no.\nAnd second, her husband was a criminal defense attorney for 30 years. \"I have no interest in needing to hire him for a fraud case,\" she says.\nBut Davis understands why travelers would manufacture receipts, an increasingly common problem for travel insurance companies. Sometimes, the demands of an insurance carrier can leave you \"utterly frustrated,\" she says.\nUsing AI for a travel insurance claim is almost too easy. Creating AI-generated receipts used to require an expert forger. Now it takes about 30 seconds to type a sentence into an app, and the results look authentic.\nIn a Verisk study released this year, 99 percent of insurers say they've already run into manipulated or AI-altered documentation, and 36 percent of consumers say they'd consider editing a claim photo or document, a number that climbs to 55 percent among Gen Z.\nAnd that brings up a question that anyone with a travel insurance claim will have to answer this summer: How do you use AI? Is it ever OK to create a document—even one that should exist but doesn't?\nWhy travel insurance claims fail\nMost travelers are honest about their claims. At Squaremouth, a travel insurance site, doctored documentation and fake travel insurance receipts turn up on less than 1 percent, says Chrissy Valdez, senior director of operations.\n\"Beyond missing documentation, the most common reason for a claim to be denied is that a traveler didn't fully read their policy and assumed they were covered in a situation where they weren't,\" she says.\nScott Fleming, president of Aon Affinity Travel Practice, says denials happen \"when there's a disconnect between what the traveler thinks the policy covers and what that policy actually covers.\"\nThe fix: Keep everything, he says. Don't toss a receipt, because it can be the difference between reimbursement and eating the loss.\n\"One of the most common reasons travelers encounter challenges during the claims process is not having the documentation needed to support a covered loss,\" says Brandon Bates, president of the US Travel Insurance Association. \"Coverage and claim requirements vary by policy, so travelers should understand how their plan works before they depart.\"\nCorey Pollard, a former insurance defense attorney who now runs a law firm in Richmond, Va., separates a claim into questions most people blur together. Did something go wrong? Do the documents prove it? Is the reason it went wrong actually covered?\n\"Most claimants will only reply to the first,\" he says. The insurance company is busy with the other two.\nHow insurers catch AI-generated fake receipts\nSo how good are the fakes?\n\"AI can make convincing documents,\" admits Alex Adekola, a licensed independent adjuster and founder of ReadyAdjuster.\nIt's so convincing that insurance companies can't catch a forgery with just fancy software. They catch it when one document doesn't fit the rest of the file. The tell is an invoice in the wrong format, or a receipt out of order.\n\"AI can't make a fake consistent with the rest of the claim when the whole file is reviewed,\" says Adekola.\nCall it the corroboration test: Where else should this transaction validate, and does it? AI has gotten good at producing legitimate-looking documents. It can't answer that second question.\nChristian Espinosa, a digital forensics specialist, says carriers already run automated checks for metadata inconsistencies—that's the data attached to files like images and documents.\n\"An AI-generated invoice does not just get you your claim denied,\" he says. \"It is flagged, investigated and may be subject to criminal review.\"\nJames Page, senior vice president and head of operations at Travel Guard, says the carrier now fights AI with AI.\n\"We have AI tools that can look at documents to tell us whether they have been manipulated by AI,\" he says. \"But like any other tool, AI tools need to be consistently upgraded to keep up with fraud methods.\"\nTyler Rodgers, president of the investigation firm Privin Network, has watched the corroboration test collapse a claim in a single step. His team once pulled the metadata on a submitted receipt and found the file had been modified three weeks after the loss it supposedly documented.\n\"Based on that one piece of information, we were able to deny the claim and initiate a fraud investigation,\" he says. He's seen civil disputes turn criminal over one altered hotel invoice.\nThe real cost of travel insurance fraud\nThe downside runs well past a denied claim. Submitting knowingly false documentation is travel insurance fraud, a crime in every state.\nKarisa Cernera, vice president of claims and compliance at Redpoint Travel Protection, says a suspicious claim doesn't stay with a regular adjuster.\n\"If a claim raises potential red flags, it may be referred to a special investigation unit,\" she says. \"These teams investigate suspected insurance fraud and work closely with law enforcement and regulatory authorities where appropriate.\"\nThose records follow a person for years. Insurance companies put fraudsters on a do-not-sell list, barred from buying through the company again.\nCernera's advice for filing a successful claim? Don't cheat.\n\"Be honest, be organized, and report incidents as soon as they happen,\" she says.\nWhere can AI help you with your travel insurance claim?\nAI isn't the problem. It's how you use it.\nMost travel insurance policies are written in gibberish. Smart travelers use AI to translate their policies into English. They paste in the text of the dense PDF and ask which perils are covered and which exclusions apply. Then they confirm the results with their insurance company.\nYou can also use AI as an organizational tool. A large language model can help you build a detailed timeline of the disruption, sort your receipts and emails into one file, and draft the who, what, where and how that the claim form asks for. Use it to write the cover note that explains what's missing and why. If your paperwork is in another language, use it to translate the doctor's report or the foreign receipt so an adjuster can read it.\nMelanie Warner, a frequent traveler who runs a publishing company, says AI can be helpful in identifying what's required to file a successful claim.\n\"I often use AI to research what information I need to get a claim approved,\" she says.\nHow to file a successful claim the right way\nInsurance experts say you shouldn't have to resort to faking an invoice to file a successful insurance claim. Here's how.\nCall before you spend. The moment a trip goes sideways, contact your insurance company. \"Call their policy's 24/7 emergency assistance line the moment an incident occurs,\" says Terry Boynton, president of Yonder Travel Insurance. The call also opens the claim, so the carrier has a record from day one.\nCapture it live. Screenshot the airline app before the gate agent changes anything. Get the doctor's note the same day, not a week later. Use your phone to photograph every receipt.\nFeed the corroboration test. Build a file that checks out against outside records: card statements, emails with real headers, a police or hospital report. A genuine transaction lives in more than one place, so hand the adjuster those places.\nName the gap, don't fill it. Missing a document? Say so, and ask what alternative proof the insurer accepts. Joe Cronin, president of International Citizens Insurance, says the better move is to contact the insurance company and ask \"rather than trying to reconstruct something after the fact.\" Enclose a short dated note spelling out what's missing, why, and what you're sending in its place. For small-dollar items, some carriers will accept a signed affidavit. \"In the case of small dollar items, we can often accept an affidavit from a policyholder that outlines their expenses even if they don't have all the receipts,\" Page says. An acknowledged hole may survive the claims process. An invented patch probably won't.\nSee a doctor, even for a sniffle. If an illness might cost you a flight or a prepaid tour, get examined, even when you'd rather ride it out in your hotel room. \"If you are going to miss a flight or are unable to use a prepaid travel service due to illness, you should seek professional medical assistance, even if you do not think it is necessary,\" says Susan Sherren, founder of the travel agency Couture Trips. \"Not everyone cares if you have a cold and an upset stomach and need to cancel your tour. Without proper documentation, your claim for a missed tour or flight may be denied.\" A provider who issues a proof-of-care invoice gives you the paper an adjuster needs.\nSubmit a complete claim. Daniel Durazo, director of external communications at Allianz Partners USA, says complete, accurate paperwork filed correctly the first time moves the fastest. \"Submit complete and accurate information from the start,\" he advises. Resubmitting incomplete claims can slow down the process.\nLet the paperwork do the talking\nI've filed my share of travel insurance claims from odd corners of the world, and the winning ones are boring. Every number has a second home, in an email, on a credit card statement, in a letter on hotel letterhead.\nAI can draw you a receipt so clean it belongs in a frame, and it will still lose to a smudged card statement an adjuster can verify with one phone call.\nDavis, the travel advisor, finally got her claim approved.\n\"The claim was paid after multiple resubmissions and letters explaining that the requested documents did not exist,\" she says.\nThat's the fight worth having, with your insurer, on the record. Not with a text-to-image app that's about to get you into legal trouble. If your paperwork has a hole, say so.\nThere are legitimate reasons to use AI during your travel insurance claim. Generating fake travel insurance receipts isn't one of them.","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.forbes.com/sites/christopherelliott/2026/07/24/can-ai-help-you-win-a-travel-insurance-claim-its-complicated/","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 10465 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260,"usable_text_length":10465,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":10465,"summary_length":260}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}