Travel insurance is bought quickly, at the end of a booking, by people who are thinking about something else. That is precisely why it so often turns out not to cover the thing that goes wrong.

The number that actually matters

Not the price. The medical cover limit and the excess. A policy with a two-million euro medical limit and a fifty euro excess is a genuinely different product from one with a fifty-thousand limit and a two-hundred-and-fifty euro excess, even if they cost within a few euros of each other.

For travel within the EU, an EHIC or GHIC card covers state healthcare but not repatriation, private treatment, or getting you home in a medically equipped aircraft. That last one is what the medical limit is really for.

Read three sections and you have read the policy

  • General exclusions — what is never covered, anywhere in the document.
  • Pre-existing medical conditions — how they are defined and what you must declare.
  • Cancellation — the specific list of reasons that qualify. “Change of mind” never appears on it.

Insurance disputes are almost never about whether something bad happened. They are about whether you declared something, or did something, months earlier.

The exclusions that catch people out

Alcohol is the big one — many policies exclude any claim where alcohol was a contributing factor, and the threshold is lower than people assume. Then: motorcycles and scooters without the correct licence, which invalidates cover in exactly the countries where people rent them most casually. Then: unattended baggage, which is defined more strictly than “I left it by my chair for a minute”.

Winter sports, diving below a certain depth, and hiking above a certain altitude are usually add-ons rather than inclusions. If your trip involves any of them, check specifically.

Buy it when you book, not when you fly

Cancellation cover starts the day the policy begins, so a policy bought the week before departure does not cover the four months in which something might have stopped you going. If you travel more than twice a year, an annual multi-trip policy is usually cheaper than two single-trip ones and removes the decision entirely.

Finally: keep the policy number somewhere you can reach without your phone, and know the emergency assistance number. That is the part of the document you will actually need.

Plan a trip to Worldwide