Maryland now requires travel advisors to carry insurance. The new law turns a long-standing industry best practice into a compliance mandate — coverage is now a legal condition of selling travel in the state, not a recommendation.

That single change reframes the calculus for every seller of travel with Maryland clients. The question is no longer whether to buy a policy. It is what the statute demands, what it costs, who verifies it, and what happens to the advisor who skips it.

The specifics will decide the real impact. The type of policy that satisfies the law, the minimum limits, the effective date and the enforcement mechanism determine whether this amounts to a signature on a renewal form or a new fixed cost that advisors must price into every booking. Those details are what Maryland advisors — and the host agencies behind them — need first.

Host agencies carry their own exposure. If independent contractors must hold coverage, the agencies that recruit and supervise them will shoulder verification: collecting certificates, updating contracts, and deciding whether their own errors-and-omissions programs need to change. A state mandate does not just regulate the individual advisor. It reaches up into the hosted-model supply chain, where responsibility between agency and contractor is already a contractual patchwork.

The sharper question is the one hanging over the new law: is insurance enough? A policy answers one failure mode — advisor error, from a misbooked fare to bad advice. It does not automatically address the other ways a trip collapses: supplier failures, refund disputes, money paid forward to operators that never deliver. The gap between an insured advisor and a protected client is where the adequacy debate lives.

State lawmakers tend to reach for insurance requirements first because they are the lightest tool in the drawer. A mandate costs the state almost nothing to impose, unlike a registration regime or a recovery fund financed by the trade. Light touch also means narrow protection. That trade-off — cheap compliance, limited recourse — is the subtext of the “is that enough” argument.

For the trade, the mandate cuts two ways. It raises the floor on who can call themselves an advisor, which flatters full-time professionals who already invest in credentials and coverage. It also adds a fixed cost that lands hardest on part-timers and new entrants, pushing some toward host agencies that can absorb compliance and others out of the market entirely. Regulation that raises costs favors scale. Expect the hosted segment to gain leverage if similar mandates spread beyond Maryland.

Watch three things next. Whether other states copy Maryland, and how quickly. Whether insurers reprice advisor risk once a state treats coverage as mandatory rather than optional. And whether legislators treat this law as the finish line or the first step — the question “is that enough” implies that someone already believes it is not.

Maryland has moved insurance from the advice column into the rulebook. Whether that proves a floor or a ceiling for advisor accountability will shape the next round of state-level rules on how travel is sold — and on who is allowed to sell it.