Annual Travel Insurance

[Don Madge]

I'm in the process of renewing our travel/medical cover and I thought this info might be useful to some. Our cover for next year will cost us £142 that allows trips away for a maximum of 90 days at a time. The cover can be reduced to 60 days or increased to 120/180 days. The cover also includes Morocco and Turkey as well as Europe. This year the cover cost us £220 for trips up to 180 days. This policy is from Comfort and only available to those having their home insurance with them. Being a combined travel/medical/house policy you can also be covered for leaving your property unoccupied for a maximum of 60/90/120/180 days at any one time. Details http://tinyurl.com/yfahk9 I've just been speaking to Richard Brewster of Comfort who confirmed that there is no upper age limit on the combined Home/travel policy. This is very good news to us approaching our "Golden Years". Incidentally we have paid £390 for travel/medical cover for a three week non motorhoming trip to China in April. It ain't cheap growing old. I know cover is available cheaper elsewhere but this combined policy suits us. It gives us all the cover we need. There are some who don't bother with travel insurance in Europe, we have witnessed at first hand some very distressing scenes with people with no cover. We have a neighbour who recently had to pay £12,000 to have a aged parent flown home from Spain by air ambulance. Regards Don

[Keith T]

An interesting way of doing this. I have just been chasing around to find a 'reasonable. travel annual cover, as my previous insurers were not intersted in anything annual or for even 60 days at over 65. In the end I was taking out a new home insurance/ buildings and contents policy with Halifax, and noted their offer, which gave me 60 days, plus no problems with age...cost pan european (joint policy, wife under 65!) was app £90, and although nhot required until the old one expires in April, cover and price fixed from that date. Excellent, and great staff on the call centre. I would never have thought of this approach, so if you are trying to establish what is availbale, try this avenue, I agree about the number of folk who travel without cover (except the E110, or whatever it is now), and personally still prefer to err on the4 cautious side and take cover.

[Mel E]

But do please read the small print VERY carefully. Most such travel insurance still excludes cover for Terrorism. Won't happen to you? Seem to remember you've recently been to both Turkey and Egypt, Don, both countries where, within the last couple of years, Brits have been seriously injured (or worse) by acts of terrorism and found they had to foot the whole medical and repatriation bill themselves - no help from the British Consul/Embassy. And not a few policies had exception clauses that meant they didn't have to pay out to the Asian Tsunami victims. Makes you think, doesn't it?