Why is holiday insurance so important to you and your family?

Getting holiday insurance when travelling, for business or pleasure, is more or less a no-brainer these days. Travel agents used to be fearful to push insurance back in the day, but now it’s standard for every traveller to have it.

We’re not trying to put a dampener on your holiday mood, but there are a lot of holiday activities that involve all kinds of risks that you don’t want to run. We’ve listed 5 reasons why you and your family should have some insurance taken out before you get on the plane and possibly run into some kind of holiday accident.

Getting sick in a foreign country is no fun

It doesn’t matter where you are; you don’t want to run the risk of getting seriously ill somewhere else, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the local healthcare system and how it works, or even worse, how much it costs.

If you’re going somewhere particularly exotic, you’ll have to be prepared for the fact that your immune system isn’t going to be as good as the locals’. You have a strong chance of getting very ill; it’s best to take out that insurance before you leave, just in case you’re going to have to be medically evacuated.

And if you think you’ve got an iron-like constitution, think again before you decide to go bungee jumping!

Loss of luggage

This has happened to everyone at least once, so why run the risk unnecessarily? If it’s happened to you on your own, you can imagine how horrid it would be for it to happen to your entire family. Nothing pulls the plug on holiday fun-time like losing all of your luggage.

Although travel insurance can’t cover absolutely everything in your lost luggage, it will probably cover the important things, like your laptop, for instance.

Trip cancellation

Sometimes, you’ll need that insurance even if you never left. Unforeseen circumstances can bar you from leaving; there could be something keeping you at home, or something devastating could happen at your destination city, like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

In this event, you’ll definitely want to have some insurance to cover the cancellation fees for your flight.

Bankruptcy

This can happen to the airline or your travel agent and trust us, it’s no fun at all. This is another thing that can hurt you before you even leave. It happened to a lot of companies during the Arab Spring of revolution, with hundreds of flights being cancelled.

Holiday compensation will be doled out if your flights and hotel bookings were all cancelled because of your travel agent going bankrupt.

(Guest Post)