Taking out travel insurance before heading off for a holiday outside the UK should be an easy task. But how do you ensure that you get a good deal?
There are two key ways of doing so.
The first is always to shop around. Prices vary considerably between insurers and your personal circumstances can make a huge difference to the policy.
The second is to ask yourself how many times you intend to travel within a year. If you are certain you will only travel once, then cheap travel insurance can quite easily be found in the form of a single-trip policy for as little as £9.
If you intend to travel two or more times then this could prove to be expensive, especially for families.
This is where a multi-trip policy will come to your rescue. Many family policies cover not just the adult couple but several children. They can be found for as little as £23 for a single person and allow you to make several trips abroad during the year.
As you can imagine, if you intend to travel abroad three times a year and pay £9 each time, while a multi-trip comes in at around £23 per person, you’ve just saved £4.
This might sound like a small saving but as you start to increase the number of trips per year and the number of people travelling on one policy, the saving you make on your travel insurance becomes much bigger.
However, there is one crucial point to remember. While we all like to find the cheapest travel insurance before we go abroad, we shouldn’t lose sight of the reasons for buying the cover in the first place.
It can be easy to look only for the cheapest policy in an effort to save money, but the reality is you could be missing out on vital aspects of cover.
For example, you must remember to check a prospective holiday insurance policy to ensure all the features you require are covered. You should look to have cover in the following areas: cancellation, medical and emergency, baggage, theft and personal liability.
You should seek medical cover to the value of £1 million when travelling in Europe and £2 million in the USA. Hospital bills can escalate extremely quickly and it is not unheard of for tourists to be quite literally bankrupted.
Of course some of these options can be taken off the policy if you do not need them, such as baggage cover and cancellation, although I suggest you think carefully about this beforehand.
One tip that may be worth remembering is that some household insurance policies also offer cover for personal items that are taken out of the home. In turn, this means you may be able to do without the same cover on your travel insurance policy, making it slightly cheaper - but do check your home and contents terms and conditions first.
Finally, remember that all insurers base the cover they offer on what is called “utmost good faith”. This means that for them to pay out on a claim they must be satisfied you were completely honest with them when you took out the policy.
The two key areas where this applies is in previous medical conditions, which should be declared at the outset, or the insurer may not pay out. Also, don’t fall for the temptation to over-claim for a loss: adding a non-existent MP3 player or an iPod to the claim could render your policy void.
To recap on the main points: shop around to find the best prices, choose a policy type according to your travel frequency, be sure you have the level of cover you require and last but not least, remember to be honest with all details given.
You can find cheap travel insurance for as little as £9 on a single trip policy, if you intend to travel several times during the year a multi-trip travel insurance policy can save you money.
