Travel insurance: what you actually need, and what's just filler

The more a trip costs, the less travel insurance should be a box ticked in a hurry at checkout, and the more it becomes part of the plan itself. And yet I see the opposite mistake all the time: people spending five thousand euros on a trip and protecting it with the twelve euro policy bundled in automatically, and others paying for duplicate coverage they already had without knowing it.

Start with the coverage that matters most on an important trip: cancellation. It covers penalties if you have to back out before departure for a serious, documentable reason. Two things worth checking closely: whether the insured amount covers the full non refundable value of the trip, not a token limit, and which cancellation causes are actually accepted. The best policies include illness, injury, and the death of family members even if they don't live with you; the weaker ones stop at your own hospitalization. Typical cost runs four to seven percent of the insured value: on a five thousand euro trip, that's two hundred to three hundred fifty euros. It sounds like a lot, until you actually need it.

Medical cover: not the place to cut corners

Overseas medical cover is the one area where cutting costs is a bad idea, and the deciding factor is always the destination. Within Europe, the European health card covers the essentials in the public system. Outside it, the numbers change scale entirely: in the United States, a week's hospital stay can top a hundred thousand dollars, and a medical repatriation from the other side of the world runs similar figures. For the US, Canada and Japan, medical coverage shouldn't drop below a million euros; for the rest of the far flung world, half a million is already a reasonable floor. Cheap policies capped at thirty thousand euros, outside Europe, are little more than a placebo.

Baggage cover, by contrast, is the most overrated of the bunch: low limits, high deductibles, payouts calculated on used value, not replacement cost. If you travel with anything valuable, insure it separately through your home insurance. Don't rely on the baggage line of a travel policy.

Before buying anything, it's worth checking what you already have. Plenty of mid to upper tier credit cards include genuine travel coverage, on the condition the trip was paid for with that card. Worth reading the fine print before paying for a duplicate. The combination I recommend most: cancellation cover sized to the trip's real value, bought right away since many policies require it within days of booking, and solid medical cover chosen based on where you're actually going. Everything else is mostly trimming.