The first question a plan sponsor asks about covering member travel is whether it pays for itself. It is not close. Here is the math, with an illustrative model, plus the cost most people forget to count.
A covered-travel benefit rides on top of a bundled-price program whose whole point is that the bundled all-in price beats standard-network cost, often by a wide margin. So the right comparison is never travel cost against zero; it is travel cost against the savings the trip unlocks.
Framed that way, the decision is easy. Across common procedures in an illustrative model, travel lands in the low single to low double digits as a share of the savings on the case, which is why a sensible policy budgets travel at 15 to 40 percent of savings and rarely gets near the ceiling.
The line item is the hotel. The real cost is a trip done badly: the member who books the cheapest room four miles out and cannot reach the facility, the rebooking scramble the day before surgery, the coordinator hours on panic calls, and the member who tells the employer the experience was a mess.
None of that shows up on the travel invoice, and all of it is more expensive than choosing the right hotel in the first place. Spending a little more on a closer, safer room is the cheapest insurance in the whole program.
No. They are an illustrative model to show the shape of the economics, not a survey or a quote. Real numbers vary by procedure, facility, and plan, so use your own contracted prices.
Anchor reasonable travel to bundle savings (roughly 15 to 40 percent) rather than to the IRS lodging figure. The full framework with editable templates is in the Travel Benefit Policy Kit.
Yes, when it lets the member capture a bundle that saves the plan a large multiple of the trip cost. A member who cannot get there, or who has a complication after an unsafe stay, does not capture the bundle at all.