About CoverTrip
Run by Damian Tysdal, licensed travel insurance agent since 2006 · Updated 12 September 2026
Who runs this site
My name is Damian Tysdal. I have sold, compared and written about travel insurance since 2006. I am a licensed insurance producer in Massachusetts (NPN 8615978), and I run CoverTrip from the South Shore of Massachusetts.
A travel insurance license is really several licenses. A travel policy pays for lost luggage (that is property and casualty), for a hospital bill abroad (accident and health), and for accidental death on the trip (life), so a producer has to hold each of those lines before the state adds the travel line on top. Mine carries all of them: life, casualty, accident and health, property, and travel.
I started the first travel insurance blog in 2006 because every website on the subject existed to sell a policy, and none of them explained one. That blog became CoverTrip. Today the same job is done on this site, in the Friday newsletter, and on the CoverTrip YouTube channel and Facebook page, which together reach more than 270,000 followers.
I have also been the customer. When my son came down with the flu a few days before a family Christmas trip, the policy we had bought paid back every dollar of the trip, flights and lodging included. That is the whole reason this site exists: the coverage works, but only if you understood what you were buying.
What CoverTrip does
Enter your trip once and every top plan comes back side by side, priced for your dates and your travelers. You pay the same price you would pay buying from the insurer directly; the insurer pays us a commission when you buy, and that is how the site makes money. There is no fee, and no plan is shown or hidden because of what it pays us.
Around the comparison sit the reviews, guides and answers: a review of every company in the comparison, guides to the situations people actually ask about (cruises, pre-existing conditions, trip cost, Medicare abroad), and straight answers to the questions that arrive every week in the comments and the inbox.
See every top plan priced for your trip
Enter your trip once and every top plan comes back side by side, priced for your dates. Same price as buying direct.
See plans & pricesAbout 60 seconds. Nothing to sign up for.How we check what we say
We keep the full policy wording for every plan in the comparison, 54 plans in all, and every specific claim on this site is checked against those documents before it is published, then re-checked when the wording changes. Where we give a number, it is a count from those plans, not an estimate. Every review and answer page carries a name and the date it was last checked.
Two rules we hold ourselves to. We never give travel insurance a deadline it does not have: a policy can be bought any time before you leave, and only two upgrades are time-sensitive. And we do not use industry words without saying what they mean in the same sentence.
The short version of the story
- 2006. Licensed to sell travel insurance. Started travelinsurancereview.net, the first travel insurance blog, with company reviews, guides and hundreds of articles. Grew to more than 100,000 visitors a month.
- 2021. Renamed CoverTrip, a name people could remember and spell, and rebuilt around the side-by-side comparison.
- Today. The comparison, the reviews, the weekly newsletter, and a YouTube channel that answers the questions travel insurance companies do not make easy to find.
Where to find me
The YouTube channel: youtube.com/@CoverTrip. The Facebook page: facebook.com/myCoverTrip. The Friday newsletter, Safe Travels, at the foot of this page. And if you have a question the site does not answer, use the contact page; the answer usually ends up in the newsletter for everyone else who was wondering the same thing.