Travelers Review

Suitable For?

Travelers is the first major homeowners insurance company to offer full integration with Amazon Alexa. “Travelers Home Central Skill for Alexa” offers tips on maintaining and protecting your home and helps you manage your policy. For example, you could instruct Alexa to “ask Home Central how to prevent water damage.” Alexa would answer: “When cold weather hits, pipes can freeze and burst. To help protect your home from water damage, take steps such as insulating pipes and keeping your home heated above 55 degrees.” Or you could instruct Alexa to “Ask Travelers what my home policy number is” and Alexa would provide the answer immediately.

What Coverage Includes

Homeowners insurance from Travelers comprises all of the standard aspects of a homeowners policy plus a few additional perks.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Coverage for repair or rebuild of your home or other structures on your property.
• Personal property coverage for furniture, clothes, electronics, and sporting goods.
• Loss of use coverage, which pays for additional living expenses if you’re forced to move out of your home temporarily due to a covered incident.
• Personal liability coverage, to protect you in the event of a lawsuit over bodily injury or property damage.
• OpenHouse, a free home history report brought to you by Travelers and partner BuildFax on your prospective home. Your report includes information on updates and repairs that have been done on the home.
• A home insurance kit from Travelers and Amazon. Comprises a free Amazon Echo Dot with Travelers Skills for Alexa, a discounted smart home device kit, and professional installation by Amazon Home Services. (This offer is only available in some states. In California, the offer is limited to a certain quantity of people that get in first).

Optional Add-Ons

Travelers offers a solid range of optional add-ons to home insurance, ensuring each user gets the level of protection they’re willing to pay for.

Here’s what’s on offer:

• Enhanced coverage for belongings covered under the basic policy.
• Expanded protection and higher limits for special classes of personal belongings, such as jewelry and other valuables.
• Personal articles floater, a separate policy for selected items.
• Coverage for personal belongings based on the replacement cost at the time of loss, with no deduction for depreciation.
• Additional replacement cost coverage for repair or rebuild of your home.
• Coverage for water backup and sump pump discharge or overflow.
• Identity fraud coverage for up to $25,000.
• Green home coverage so you can repair, replace, or rebuild with greener materials after a covered loss.
• Umbrella insurance, offering an additional layer of protection beyond the liability limits of your home insurance policy.

Discounts

Travelers offers the following discounts:

• Bundling discounts for purchasing home and auto together. 
• 5% green home discount for getting your home certified by the Leadership Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) organization.
• Protective device discount for installing one or more of: smoke detectors and fire alarms; interior sprinkler; home security system; smart home device.
• Home buyer discount kicks in if you purchased in the last 12 months.
• Loss-free discount applies if you experience no loss within a specified time period.

Application Process

A good way to get started is by applying for a quote online. Throughout the quote request form, Travelers supplies tips to help guide your coverage selections, quick answers to common questions, and tips on how you can reduce the cost of your coverage.

The questions are fairly similar to the ones you’ll find on other home insurance application forms. You’ll need to supply information about yourself, any co-applicants, and your home. The questions about your home can get quite detailed, ranging from basics like square footage and age of home to roof materials to how the home is heated.

One important note: Travelers is available in 42 states plus DC. It doesn’t operate in Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, or Wyoming.

How Safe is It?

Travelers is just about the safest home insurance provider in the United States, if its history and financial strength are any indication. The Travelers Companies, Inc. has been around since 1853, making it one of the oldest continuous insurance providers in the US. It has an A++ rating from A.M. Best, the highest of 16 possible financial strength ratings. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and ranked 106th on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of largest corporations in the US. It has its headquarters in New York City and offices in every US state plus Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, China, and Brazil.

Claims & Customer Support

If you need to report an incident, you can do so online or by phone. Travelers offers useful resources to help with your claim, including a claims library, service-provider search tool, and workers compensation resources.

Travelers ranked poorly on the 2018 J.D. Power US Home Insurance Study of customer satisfaction, indicating that customers may not have been all that happy with the speed or effectiveness of its claims service. Travelers received a score of 791 (out of a possible 1,000), placing it 24th out of the 28 insurance companies surveyed and last of the 10 largest homeowners insurance companies.

Summary

There’s a lot to like about Travelers’ home insurance offering. Travelers clearly wants to make its users’ lives easier, hence the partnership with Amazon Alexa. The other standout area for Travelers is its approach to eco-friendly homes, with the 5% discount for meeting green building standards. If you’re looking for a major home insurance provider that moves with the times, it’s well worth considering Travelers.