Should You Always Pick the Cheapest Travel Insurance?

Single trip insurance is ideal for anyone who is going away on a short holiday. It covers just one trip and is often cheaper than multi-trip policies for this very reason. Of course, if you are intending to go away more than a couple of times in a single year, a multi-trip policy could prove to be more cost effective.

One of the major pointers people look for when buying this form of policy is, of course, price. However there are some very good reasons why choosing the cheapest single trip insurance policy may not always be the smartest move.

Higher excess amounts

As with many other forms of cover, a single trip policy is sold with a variety of excesses in place. For example, if you needed to cancel your holiday because of illness and the holiday cost £500 you would get that back minus the excess amount. The cheapest policies are usually sold with a higher excess level, so for a few pounds more you may be able to reduce the excess by a considerable amount. This would leave you with far less to swallow if you did need to make a claim.

Lower amounts on coverage

This is another area to watch out for. It is quite common for different policies to put different upper limits on the amount of cover they will provide you with. For example, while a cheaper policy might limit the amount of personal liability cover to £500,000 a more expensive policy might provide you with double this amount. Since the recommended minimum level is usually £1 million, you can see that the cheapest policies would fall far short of this.

The same applies to items you take with you that get lost or stolen. Every policy will have a single item limit in place, and this may well be lower with a cheaper single trip insurance policy. Always make sure the policy you choose has generous limits in this sense and that they will cover everything you intend to take with you. Expensive items such as cameras and smart phones can very often come close to the limit, before you even think about anything else!

As you can see there is a real need to compare the different policies and think about what you are actually getting for your money when it comes to the best travel policy. Getting a good deal is one thing, but when the cheapest deals don’t give you the coverage you need, the deal isn’t that good after all. With lots of variety and plenty of attractive deals out there, make sure you do your utmost to get the best next time you go away.

Patrick Chong is the Managing Director of Insuremore. We provide low cost travel insurance and offer a range of policies including single trip insurance, annual, multi-trip and family cover. 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.