Travel Insurance - Keep Your Holiday Protected!
By admin • May 3rd, 2007 • Category: Insurance
Holidays aren’t exactly cheap these days. Gone are the years when you could pitch up at the English seaside and spend a couple of weeks with the kids paddling in a storm tossed grey sea at Scarborough or Blackpool. These days of sunshine abroad and quality children’s entertainments come at a price. Today, there’s no better reason to insure your holiday.
Saved
Having saved all year for the annual holiday you want to make sure you don’t lose that money due to a last minute family emergency or illness. These days when you book your holiday with a travel operator they are entitled to insist that you have insurance cover. It does not, however, have to be taken out with them.
We are assuming you are travelling abroad on holiday rather than travelling on business, when you may want to have some additional or certainly a slightly different sort of cover and you may be covered by your employer’s insurance.
The sort of cover you will find typically included in travel insurance is a degree of protection for minor thefts or loss of cash, cover for medical expenses and some basic personal accident cover. This latter cover is designed to pay out if you accidentally receive an injury on holiday which results in blindness, loss of limb or other injury resulting in permanent disability.
Check before you travel
Remember to check exactly what is covered in the insurance before you go, because things like scuba diving or abseiling almost certainly won’t be. If you are intending to have a particularly active holiday pay particular attention to the small print and check if you can get insurance to cover your intended activities cheaper in the UK or in your destination country.
Repatriation
Make sure your policy includes the cost of getting you back home again if you are sick or have an accident and if you are travelling with your family make sure it covers all of you, including the children.
Always take copies of your insurance documents and keep them in a safe place. Most insurance companies expect a certain degree of responsibility on your part to look after possessions covered by the insurance. For example, you shouldn’t leave your wallet on display while you nip off for a quick dip in the sea. You should lock your villa and vehicle when you leave them unattended and always keep valuables out of sight. If you fall prey to a thief and the insurer finds you negligent in these simple acts they can decide not to pay out. But following common sense practices will make sure your insurer will pay out quickly.
Home insurance
You will undoubtedly have some form of home contents insurance in place. It is worth checking your policy to see if you have already got cover for your cash and possessions while abroad. With the globe trotting nature of many families these days this cover is automatically in your home contents insurance: no sense in paying for it twice.
Credit cards
While being mindful of the possibilities of credit card fraud it makes sense to use the protection built in to credit card purchases to make sure you can get your money back if an item you buy breaks or fails to meet your expectations.
Time to insure
If you are one of the lucky families in Britain who travel abroad quite a lot during the course of a year it will be worth taking out travel insurance on an annual basis rather than each time you travel.
Travel has become such a common place activity that we forget it wasn’t always like this. In our rush to find a place where to rest once in a while, the one thing we must never overlook is travel insurance. It’s a great boon to ensure a completely restful and relaxing break.
- Get a travel insurance quote from Nations Finance!
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