Do you think holiday insurance is a necessity or a luxury?

[faithfultoGeorgeMichael]

Where I live there are an increasing number of crowd funders every year for people who have an accident on holiday and have no insurance. I have always thought this was a minority of people willing to accept this risk but yesterday I spoke to a younger colleague (I am 51, she is 32) who said that no one she knows ever buys insurance and it is seen as a foolish waste of money to her and her friends.

She is off to Indonesia for a month in August with her children - with no insurance!

YABU: I would go abroad without insurance
YANBU I would only go abroad if I had insurance

The stupid ones are not the only the one's that refuse to buy insurance but also the one's that donate to any begging for help because the feckless can't afford to pay their hospital bills.

It’s worth pointing out that insurance is not just about covering medical bills abroad, it also covers you before you even go.

If you broke your leg a week before your holiday and couldn’t fly you’d have cancellation cover, or, god forbid, a relative died while you were away and you needed to fly home early then you would be covered.

i think Martin Lewis once gave a stat about a significant % of travel insurance claims are made before the holiday even starts.

One of my kids needed a routine prescription in the US, which came to $200. We had to fork out the cash up front and claim it back on the insurance afterwards.

There probably is an age factor, our insurance is part of our bank account but when I first started traveling abroad in mid 1980s I’m sure you had to take out insurance when booking, it wasn’t optional. So maybe I’ve always assumed everyone did it. I also bought annual insurance for our DD once she became an adult and wasn’t included in ours, I’m sure it was under £50 for the year.

A solo travelling friend was taken ill on a plane to a country in South America. Luckily she had proper insurance because the demands for money started with the ambulance crew driving her to a cash point to get cash to pay them to take her to hospital!

She was able to contact her insurers at the hospital so didn’t have to fork out more cash, but it was a salutary lesson. The eventual bill from the hospital was huge and itemised to the nth degree, eg charges made for ampoules of saline to flush out a drip in her hand.

I would never go abroad without insurance, we just factor it into the cost. We’re
going abroad 4 times this year so we’ve got an annual policy which was around £600 as DH and I have both got pre-existing health conditions. I can’t stand the idea of being away and running up hundreds of thousand of pounds in medical bills.

I point blank refuse to donate to Go Fund Me pages for anyone who didn’t get insurance. They knew the risk and still went, not my problem to solve 🤷‍♀️

Just make sure you are covered but read the small print as insurance companies are very good at getting out of paying people if something goes wrong and will say it was in the small print. Be careful.

I just renewed our multi trip annual European cover today. I've noticed quite an increase from last year but still only £69 for 2 adults with good cover and a 5 star defacto rated company.

I might be wrong but Im sure its in the t&cs for tui that you need it.

Its not really that expensive. I dont know why people risk it

No it doesn't, but those costs aren't going to bankrupt me. They are annoying, but wouldn't bring my finances to a point where I'd need anyone else to bail me out.

As it is I do take insurance, but I can understand why some might take a calculated risk.

I don't think it should be illegal to travel without - it's a matter of personal responsibility.

You should buy your insurance minutes after booking your holiday. Too many people assume you’ll get a full refund from the holiday company if you’re unable to go due to illness etc.

I suppose booner means risk averse. It has its advantages.

As I read recently, there’s two types of travel insurance; the type that you pay yourself and the type where you start a GoFundMe and expect others to pay.
In my mind it’s an absolute necessity and it’s been drummed into my children too.
I’ve just renewed my worldwide (ex USA & Caribbean) annual policy and have paid an extra £10 to cover enhanced trip disruption as trips coming up have several flight changes. It works out at less than £10 per month and I already have five weeks away booked with hopefully more to come.

I should be a requirement for going on holiday. I would not bother if I was staying in UK, but if going anywhere else I definitely have insurance. If i couldn't afford the insurance I would not go. I remember going on holiday with a friend who casually dropt into thr conversation thst she didn't have any insurance. I was very angry.

Yes even in an EU country where the EHIC arrangement will provide some cover for UK citizens, it does not cover repatriation.

I was talking about people from overseas ending up in a Uk hospital. I will admit the NHS are not as good at getting the money out of them, but believe me they will have a damn good go.

I don't want to be bankrupted by an illness or injury abroad, so I consider it a necessity. And yes, it's expensive, because I have several pre existing conditions, but nothing like as expensive as if something went wrong and I didn't have it.

I definitely wouldn't rely on this instead of travel insurance. If you call out an ambulance in Spain, they will just take you to the nearest hospital - it could be public and covered, or it could be a private hospital.

I'm generally pretty cynical about insurance - I never bother getting insurance for appliances, boilers etc. I only insure for stuff that might bankrupt me to replace / cover. Medical bills abroad can easily fall into this category (I ran up a bill of around $50k in a private Mexican hospital in only 3 days!)

I have medical conditions which make insurance prohibitively expensive, so I don't go abroad any more. If I were single, I might consider doing without and having to sell up if the worst happened, but I wouldn't saddle my husband with ruinous bills so that I can have a holiday.

It's annoying, as my conditions are being treated, so are far less likely to cause issues than they would have been before I was diagnosed, but if I didn't declare them and broke a leg I'd be screwed.

Yes I had similar and agree it is stressful even when you do have the cover. When I phoned our insurer whilst sitting beside my DH on a hospital trolley, they said at one point they couldn't help if I didn't have the exact policy number. No understanding that you are actively in a difficult situation.
It was all fine in the end, but they didn't confirm we would be covered for the ambulance and ER visit until 2 days later.

We always purchase insurance an annual policy for Europe/Egypt etc. I have some pre declared health issues so it's about £170.

Last year my husband had a seizure on the last morning of our trip. He broke his spine and had to have fusion surgery in Turkey. We believe the bill was circa £30k. He's now diagnosed and it's added to our policy. Price this year is still about the same give or take £20. Why someone would travel without it is beyond me.

I was lucky a few years ago and had a pulmonary embolism. I was back in the UK when I took ill but clearly things had started when I was in Mexico. A policy for Worldwide including the Caribbean is alot more given his recent incident so we're staying more local (about £400 for such a policy) but if we were heading back to the US or something then without question we'd take out another policy.

I cannot tell you how stressful it was even with the insurance last year getting things sorted. I dread to even think what we would of done without insurance. It's not other people's jobs to pick up the tab because you couldn't put aside another few hundred quid.

Yes, prescription costs and co-pays at the doctor's are routine, even for Americans. But, the difference is that health insurance in the US will often not cover all the cost of prescriptions, and co-pays are in addition to insurance. At least with travel insurance paid for in the UK, you can claim back nearly all your costs, depending on your excess. All it takes for an uninsured traveller from the UK to go from wealth to poverty is one major medical incident in the US requiring surgery or hospital treatment. It's not worth the risk.

At least a UK traveller won't also risk losing their job as well, which is what happens all the time to Americans who have no health insurance.

And vice-versa.

I agree you should get it but will push back it's a minor expense. Owing to preexisting conditions my holiday insurance runs into the hundreds. It's really not cheap, even for short trips.

I always get it. I’ve never had to make a claim. But knowing my luck, you can guarantee the worst would happen if I ever left it 😄

But that's not true in the case of the OP from what we can tell. It's part of the cost of a holiday though, and holidays run into hundreds/thousands in total cost. It's fine if you go without it if you don't want to pay the cost, just don't expect others to contribute to your crowd funding to pay the bill if it turns out you needed it.