Travel Insurance: Should you Buy It?

There’s an age-old adage used by seasoned travellers throughout the world (although, to be fair, they translate it into their own languages!), and it goes a little something like this: ‘You can’t afford insurance? You can’t afford to travel’. So, in answer to the title of this blog, ‘yes’, you certainly do need to buy travel insurance if you are travelling abroad. Here are a few of the things that you might not be aware of, but which is important to know:

1. If you don’t buy travel insurance, you may unwittingly be saddling your family with future debt. This is a horrible thing to think about, but if you die abroad – and it does happen – your insurance will cover the cost of having your body shipped back to the UK. Without insurance, your family/spouse/etc. will have to foot the bill, and it can be very expensive because it’s a situation that is covered with red tape in many countries in the world.

2. Unexpected things happen. Many people don’t take out insurance because they figure they’ve never needed it before, so they won’t need it now. While this might well be true, it might well be false too, and if it turns out to be false, you will often have far steeper bills to pay than a simple insurance premium. For example, imagine you travel to America, you stub your toe, and it fractures. This seems like a small issue – 2 hours in hospital max. However, it will cost you $500 alone for the emergency room visit! Then you’d have an additional bill of ~$250 to fix a simple fracture. A broken toe may require surgery, and then you’re looking at a minimum of $2000! Travel insurance costs on average £170 for a two-week holiday for two adults to the USA (top levels of cover). As you can appreciate, the risk involved with travelling without insurance far outweighs the benefits of traveling with insurance, so it’s a no brainer: insurance all the way.

3. People steal your stuff! Argh, when you’re a tourist you tend to stand out from the crowd. In some respects, this is great: the locals come over to talk to you, people are super nice, they like to tell you the best places to visit, etc. However, there is a darker side to standing out: it makes you a target for thieves. If you've done a lot of travelling, then it’s likely that you have been a victim of theft. Stolen wallets, passports and bags, are commonplace, and it can cost a lot of money to get things straight and in order. Stolen passports are one of the biggest inconveniences, because it takes a lot of time to sort out and it’s hard to prove your identity. Again, insurance will cover you in such instances – they’ll do the hard work for you.