The hospital receptionist in Chiang Mai slid a bill across the counter: 47,000 baht. Roughly £1,050. The night before, I’d slipped on a wet tile outside a noodle stall and snapped something in my wrist. Now here I was at 2am, wrist the size of a mango, staring at a number that would’ve wiped out three months of travel. I had insurance. Bought it eight minutes before my flight — the cheapest policy I could find — and I genuinely had no idea whether it covered me. That uncertainty cost me more sleep than the injury did.
Forty-odd policies later, I’ve claimed on four. I’ve also thrown money at cover that protected me from nothing I’d ever face. Eleven years, 67 countries. Insurance is the least glamorous thing you’ll buy, and the one that decides whether a bad day becomes a ruined year.
Why This Matters
Nobody tells you this: your home health system probably doesn’t follow you. As a Brit, I get free healthcare at home. Step outside the UK and that safety net vanishes entirely. A broken leg in the US can run £30,000. An air ambulance off a Nepal trek? £15,000 and up. Those aren’t scare numbers — I’ve met people who paid them.
And it isn’t just medical. It’s the £600 you lose when your bag doesn’t arrive in Lisbon. The £400 flight you eat when a family emergency pulls you home. The £2,000 cancellation when you roll your ankle two days before a trip. Travel insurance is the only product I buy hoping to never use it.
Most travellers treat it as an afterthought — a box to tick at checkout, cheapest option, clicked through without reading a word. I did that for years. Then I learned the hard way that a £12 policy and a £60 policy aren’t the same product with a different price tag. They’re different animals.
Worth your time? Absolutely. Twenty minutes of reading now can save you a five-figure surprise later. Let me show you how I do it.
Top 5 Tips
1. Buy the policy for the trip, not the trip for the policy. Sounds obvious. People get it backwards anyway. Ask what could actually go wrong on this specific trip. Trekking in the Andes? You need altitude cover and helicopter evacuation. Renting a scooter in Vietnam? You need motorcycle cover — and most basic policies exclude it unless you hold a full licence for that engine size. Sitting in a Paris café for a week? Basic medical and baggage is plenty. Match the policy to the risk, not the price.
2. Read the exclusions list before anything else. Every policy has one. Usually two pages of small print, and the most important thing you’ll read all year. Common traps: pre-existing conditions (even controlled ones), adventure sports, alcohol-related incidents, anything illegal locally. I once watched a guy’s claim get rejected because he’d been riding a scooter without the right licence class. The insurer wasn’t cruel. It was in the exclusions, in plain English, and he hadn’t read them.
3. Check the excess, not just the premium. A £15 policy with a £250 excess on every claim can cost you more than a £40 policy with a £50 excess. Do the maths on a realistic scenario: one medical claim, one baggage claim. Suddenly cheap isn’t cheap. I now compare total cost across two claims, not the sticker price.
4. Buy annual multi-trip if you travel more than twice a year. Game-changer for me. My annual policy runs about £95 and covers unlimited trips up to 45 days each. Three or four single-trip policies a year were costing me £150–£200. The annual one paid for itself by February. Just check the per-trip day limit — long slow travel may need an extension or a long-stay policy instead.
5. Keep every receipt and report everything immediately. Insurers aren’t villains, but they are bureaucrats. They need paperwork. The moment something goes wrong — theft, injury, cancellation — call the emergency line before you pay for anything if you can. Get a police report for thefts, even when the local police seem uninterested. Keep receipts for every medical expense, every taxi to the hospital, every replacement item. I photograph everything and back it up to the cloud the same day. Claims go smoothly when the paperwork is airtight.
One more thing: don’t lie on the application. Ever. Undeclared conditions can void the entire policy. I’ve seen it happen. Brutal, and entirely avoidable.
Budget Breakdown
Real numbers from my own purchases. All in pounds sterling, because that’s my home currency, but the ratios hold wherever you’re from.
- Single-trip basic cover (Europe, 2 weeks): £12–£25. Covers medical, baggage, cancellation. Fine for a city break.
- Single-trip comprehensive (worldwide, 1 month, adventure sports included): £45–£80. What I buy for trekking or scooter-heavy trips.
- Annual multi-trip (worldwide, 45-day per-trip limit): £90–£140. My current policy was £98. Best value if you travel often.
- Long-stay backpacker policy (12 months, worldwide): £250–£400. Cheaper per day than any single-trip option if you’re gone a year.
- Typical excess: £50–£250 per claim. Check this carefully.
- What a claim actually costs you: the excess, plus anything over your cover limit. A £1,050 hospital bill with a £100 excess and full medical cover cost me £100 out of pocket. That’s it.
Compare that to the £1,050 bill I was staring at in Chiang Mai. My £38 policy that year covered the whole thing minus a £75 excess. Best £38 I ever spent. The year before, I’d bought a £14 policy that excluded “sports and activities” — vague wording that would have left me paying the full bill if the fall had happened during a hike instead of outside a noodle stall. I got lucky. Luck isn’t a strategy.
Budget tip: buy direct from the insurer’s website, not through a comparison site’s affiliate link, once you’ve decided on a policy. Sometimes it’s cheaper. Sometimes it isn’t. Check both. And if you’re under 35, you’re subsidising older travellers — your premiums are lower because your risk is lower. Use that.
One Mistake to Avoid
The mistake is buying insurance after you’ve booked, or worse, after something has already gone wrong. Insurance covers the future, not the past. Book a £900 flight, buy cover a week later, then have your employer refuse your leave the day after booking — you’re not covered. Cover starts when you buy it, not when you book.
I learned this the expensive way in 2018. Booked a return flight to Colombia, then spent three weeks dithering over which policy to buy. My dad had a health scare. I needed to cancel. I called the insurer I’d finally bought from two days earlier — they covered cancellation from the purchase date, and my dad’s pre-existing condition wasn’t declared, so the claim was dead on arrival. I ate £640. That’s a lot of hostel nights.
Buy the policy the same day you book the first non-refundable thing. Not the day before you fly. The same day. And if family members’ health might affect your plans, declare their conditions too — many policies cover cancellation for close relatives, but only if you tell them upfront.
Here’s my counter-intuitive take, and I’ll defend it: for most short, low-risk trips, the cheapest adequate policy is genuinely fine. The industry wants you to believe you need the premium tier with gadget cover and a concierge line. You usually don’t. What you need is solid medical cover, a sensible excess, and exclusions you’ve actually read. Everything else is upsell. Spend your money on the medical limit, not the bells and whistles.
So before your next trip, do one thing: pull up your policy — or the one you’re about to buy — and read the exclusions page. Out loud. Ten minutes. It might save you a thousand pounds. And it’ll definitely save you the 2am panic I had in Chiang Mai, wrist throbbing, staring at a bill, wondering whether the cheapest eight-minute purchase of my life was about to become the most expensive.
Travel far. Travel cheap. But travel covered.