This list comes out of twenty years of claims I have actually made and three that I should have. The rule I use is short: read the wording for the ten items below, price them separately, and buy the policy that covers the worst of them rather than the one with the loudest advert.
The ten items I read before I look at the price
- Medical treatment and evacuation. Domestic health cover almost never follows you across a border, and a stretcher flight home runs into five figures. This is the line that makes the rest of the policy worth carrying.
- Missed connections. A multi-leg itinerary means one late arrival can invalidate the next two tickets. Good wording pays for the rebooking and for a bed if you are stranded overnight.
- Lost or stolen documents. Without a replacement passport you cannot check in, hire anything or clear customs. Cover here should include the fees, not just the photocopies.
- Theft and pickpocketing. Phones, cameras and cash go in one afternoon. Set the excess you can live with and check whether the policy wants a police report before it pays.
- Illness before you leave. Trip cancellation is a separate section in most booklets. If the trip is expensive, this is the section that pays for itself the one time it matters.
- The travel provider goes out of business. An airline I know folded the day before a friend's flight from Rome, and the replacement ticket cost her over four hundred dollars out of pocket.
- Adventure and sporting activity. Diving, skiing, sailing and anything with an engine are usually excluded by default. If the trip is built around one of them, buy the add-on rather than hoping.
- Civil unrest and terrorism. Rare, expensive, and the reason a policy should let you cancel a country rather than a booking.
- Delayed and lost luggage. Bags are delayed far more often than they vanish. Per-day payment for the delay is the clause I have used three times and been paid for each time.
- Emergency prescriptions. Losing a regular medication abroad is not an emergency until it is. Replacement cover matters most if you take something that cannot be substituted locally, and most insurers will fund a local pharmacy if you call the assistance line first.
How I compare two quotes
Once the ten items are in front of me I compare the medical ceiling first, the excess second, and the cancellation limit third, in that order. Two policies that cost the same can differ by a factor of five on the evacuation figure, and that is the number that decides whether you get flown home or get a bill.
I also check the territorial limits line by line. A policy that covers Europe in the base tier and the rest of the world only as an extension is fine for one trip and wrong for the next, and the extension is usually cheaper when bought up front than when claimed later. The same applies to the number of days: a policy written for a two week trip will quietly stop paying on day fifteen, which is exactly the night the flight gets cancelled.
- Check whether the medical section has a per-condition cap or only an annual total.
- Check the excess against the cost of the thing you are most likely to lose.
- Check the claim window. A number of policies require notification within twenty-four hours of the incident.
How a claim actually runs
Reading the wording is only half of it. The other half is what you do in the first hour after something goes wrong, and that sequence is the same on almost every policy I have held.
- Report it before you leave the scene where it happened. Most wordings ask for notification within twenty-four hours, and a late report is the easiest reason for an insurer to decline.
- Get a police report for anything stolen, even if the officer would rather you did not bother. Without the reference number the baggage and electronics sections rarely move.
- Photograph the damage, the boarding pass, the bag tag and the receipt for whatever you had to buy in the meantime, then keep the originals in a different bag from the one you lost.
- Send everything in one submission rather than in pieces. Splitting a claim across three emails is how a straightforward case becomes a four week case.
What stays on my phone
A claim goes faster when the details are somewhere other than your memory, so I keep four things together in one note before I leave the house. It takes five minutes to set up and it has saved me an hour on two separate claims.
- The policy number, the assistance line and the claims address, written as plain text so they work without signal.
- A photograph of the policy wording pages for medical and cancellation, because the PDF is the copy you cannot open at two in the morning.
- The card the policy was bought on, with the last four digits visible and the rest covered.
- Two photographs of the bag before departure, one showing the contents laid out, which settles most luggage arguments in a minute.
The two I would not drop
If the budget forces a choice, keep medical and evacuation and keep cancellation. Those two cover the events that cost more than the trip itself, and everything else on the list is a refund rather than a rescue. I would rather arrive somewhere with thinner baggage cover than with a policy that stops at the border.
Buy it on the day you book the first non-refundable piece, not on the morning you fly, because the cancellation section only works from the moment the policy starts. Buying earlier than that adds nothing, since the cover begins when the policy is issued rather than when you land. Then put the policy number and the emergency line in your phone and in your bag, because the pocket with the paper copy is the one that goes missing.
One last habit, and it costs nothing: read the exclusions before the benefits. Every booklet has a page listing what is not covered, and that page tells you more about the policy than the first four pages of marketing do. If the two words you care about appear in the exclusions, the premium next to them is irrelevant.