Travel insurance that I could fly back if mother has emergency?

[CheeseEloise1]

I am looking for a fairly flexible annual travel insurance. We are going on a few short holidays this year. My mother is in a nursing home and I want peace of mind that I can get back if there was an emergency. Is there any travel insurance that would cover this?

Can't make any specific recommendations but in general insurance premiums are (the percentage risk that something will happen )x(the cost of dealing with it)x(a profit margin). Insurance companies try to minimise the risks they take by excluding things that are quite likely.
If you find something that meets this, check how they would define "an emergency" - given that she is in a nursing home and therefore presumably doesn't depend on you for care or support how would you expect them to define it? I would expect that any affordable policy that covered this would have a draconian definition which ensured they almost never pay out, and any policy with a definition acceptable to your own expectations would be prohibitively expensive.

I suspect the cost of such insurance is prohibitive and you would be as well to either stay within " arms reach" as it were or be clear there is someone you trust around back at base and go knowing she may deteriorate when you are away.

When mum was ill but mentally alert she told us to go and enjoy our holidays with out worrying about her.

I have a disabled DD who is unable to travel abroad with us, so she always goes into respite when we go on holiday. We have always made sure that we go somewhere where one of us could potentially get a flight back on any given day and we just accept we would have to pay the additional flight ourselves and have the holiday curtailed. I spent a long time ringing around insurance companies trying to get insurance which would cover our situation but failed miserably as DD has a pre-existing condition. Ironically, we were told we could have got insurance to take DD with us (at a price) but not for leaving her back in the UK.

Whether you get insurance depends on the condition of your relative. You definitely need to speak to individual insurance companies and they will guide you.

I think the best solution would be to save up enough spare money incase you need to make an earlier return from your holiday

I am not aware that travel insurance covers for this type of scenario

However I do suggest that you take out travel insurance as soon as you book every holiday, incase you need to cancel a prebooked holiday at short notice. However read the small print, because some existing illnesses are not covered for close family

I took my dad on hols to Spain with dementia, diabetes, heart disease. I'd looked into insurance and concluded that for 5 days away it was just too expensive. We just had an EHIC. In the event there were no medical emergencies (but plenty of dementia related mishaps!). I wouldn't entertain going further afield eg America.

Please please whataboutbob don't take your dad away with only and EHIC again. This only covers basic treatment. If something terrible happened and your dad needed to be repatriated or something that wouldn't be covered and you would have several thousands of pounds to pay. This has happened in my extended family and thankfully there was insurance as the bills would have been over £10k

Sympathy for your position, Elousise, we were in this position for many years and never found any insurance that didn't exclude all pre-existing conditions which would have rendered it useless.
We got some peace of mind by ensuring that we had a credit card with sufficient balance on it to ensure we could get home without delay, had the necessity arose. We would have worried about paying it off later, but at least we would have been able to get home quickly. Not cost effective, but in the end, we never needed to use it.

But cakes, surely the decision about insurance is on if something happening, properly supervised, is high/low risk and high/low impact.

DM used to love cruises. The cruise company was willing to take her if she had one-to-one supervision, and the carer is willing to go. They did not seem surprised about the idea of a passenger with dementia, and oddly a cruise ship is quite a controlled environment. In the end she decided she did not want to go. (The conversation would be about how her sheltered housing was like a prison. The carer is now able to offer her a cruise as a response. She unfortunately is aware enough of her confusion to not want the unfamiliar.) If she had gone and needed to be brought home, I would have cashed in her ISAs.

Our parents are in the twilight of their lives. The money is money my parents earned and saved, and my mother in particular had learned to be frugal through the war and continued to be so. I am happy for it to be spent, rather than inherited.

Closer to home, Just Go is a firm that is good with older customers. Shortly before she was diagnosed, DM used them to visit her origional home town. They got her near to there and into a hotel and then the hotel found her a taxi for the day. (DM obviously said nothing about this to us!) They are good with pick ups and drop offs, the drivers are kind and they seem to count passengers on and off the bus.

Bob, that's a terrible idea, you get stuck with a bill in thousands if anyone is ill or dies.

OP I have the same problem but you usually just have to accept the risk. The wording around returning for an emergency is complex. You have to pay for the flights anyway then claim back through insurance after.

I agree it was a risk, a calculated one. I wouldn t advocate it for others necessarily but in our case it was important dad had one last trip abroad, insurance would either have been impossible with his medical conditions, or ridiculously expensive. He's now way past being able to travel so it's no longer an issue.

My family case involved a sudden death. No way it could have been foreseen. A fit healthy person with no health risks. Without insurance family would have been responsible for the international repatriation of the body. There is no government financial help or responsibility for this.

It's difficult though isn't it? I went away in May and worried the whole time that my father's care home was going to call me about something (they did but it wasn't serious enough for me to need to go back). I wasn't that far away so could probably have got back to the UK for a day and would have just paid for the extra air fare.

I had booked the trip back in November when my father was still living at home and looking after himself so if I had to curtail the trip altogether I could have probably argued the toss with an insurance company.

But now he's actually in a nursing home I am more or less stuck until he passes away (or I take the hit if we need to curtail a trip - or we don't curtail the trip) as any insurer is going to argue that I knew that he could pass away at any time. It's utterly rubbish. You could be in limbo for months or even years.