Top 3 Tips for Ensuring a Safe Family Holiday

The holiday season can either be a boon or a bane to the average family; it can be extremely stressful if you don’t play your cards right, or it can be the best time ever for the whole family. If you’re going on a holiday and need to make sure all the loose ends are covered (starting with getting good family holiday travel insurance), check out the following tips.

Proactive Stress Management

The holidays can put quite a toll on your health, not to mention significantly drain your wallet - but it doesn't have to be that way. Many people undergo extraordinary stress simply because they fail to keep things in check. Undue worries can arise from the simplest things, such as failing to pay a bill on time, not planning how the holiday should be planned, or even forgetting to get a good family holiday travel insurance package. When hassles accumulate because the things you should have taken care of were left unattended up to the last minute, the cascade of consequences that hits you can be overwhelming. The solution is to keep your commitments and the money you spend in check. Try to always maintain a balance between work, home and play. Finish your tasks on time or earlier, for example, so that the time you spend at work will not eat into the time you spend with your family, and ensure you always get a good night’s sleep. If you're not rushing around before your break away, you're less likely to forget anything.

Handle Food Safely

The Christmas holidays are, of course, a time of feasts. Not surprisingly, it’s also a time when the risk of food poisoning shoots through the roof – especially when away from home in an unfamiliar environment. Aside from getting proper family holiday travel insurance coverage (which will protect the family in cases of food-related illnesses abroad), you can take charge of your family’s safety as far as meals are concerned. The most basic is ensuring all food is handled properly – make sure children wash their hands and always have a bottle of hand sanitizer within easy reach. Maintain an acute awareness of different types of foods and how each should be handled properly. If you're in self-catering accommodation, keep raw meat (pork, beef, and poultry) away from ready-to-eat food and eating surfaces, and always cook food to the recommended temperature. Most importantly, do not leave prepared food or sandwiches out in the open air (especially during warm days) for more than two hours.

Make your Home Environment Safe

Nothing can be a worse blow to a happy break than having a family member injured. If you’re going abroad, one effective way to manage the financial consequences of anything going wrong is getting proper family holiday travel insurance. On the other hand, the least you can do is ‘injury-proof’ your accommodation and warn children against imminent dangers. Often, all it takes is some common sense. Do not use generators or grills or any other device that burns gasoline inside the accommodation and, most importantly, check smoke and carbon monoxide detectors are working.

Patrick Chong is the Managing Director of Insuremore. We provide low cost travel cover and offer a range of policies including annual, multi-trip, single-trip and family holiday travel insurance. For all your travel cover needs, Insuremore can help you in the quickest and most cost-efficient way.

Writer and Online Marketing Manager in London.