Buying Multi-Trip Travel Insurance
21 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Consumer Tips Tags: Buying Travel Insurance, Multi-trip, Travel Insurance
When you are getting ready for your holiday, if you are anything like me, you tend to almost forget about your holiday insurance and rush out last minute to pick up a policy to cover you for your trip. For one-off trips this is fine, however this is time consuming and unnecessarily expensive if you are a frequent traveller.
Annual multi-trip travel insurance is aimed at those of us who for work, or pleasure travel on international trips at least three times a year, but if you hunt around some providers can provide you with multi-trip insurance that can even be cheaper than buying just two single trip policies.
By buying multi-trip insurance, you are covered for an unlimited number of trips, providing the trip falls within the time limit specified by the insurance provider – the sort of limits can be for specified areas of the world, certain activities, and length of trips.
Getting a policy like this works particularly well for people who are asked to go away suddenly for business trips on short notice or who regularly take advantage of last minute deals and may not have time to organise insurance before they go. Some advantages of taking out annual multi-trip insurance include:
- Time is saved booking insurance before each trip
- The insurance can be more suited to the adventurous traveller than other types of insurance, as standard Annual Multi-trip policies provide cover for eventualities that may not be deemed likely to occur for single trips
- There are very often discounts given for couples and families with some providers even offering attractive “kids go free” deals
- The cover is continuous: once it is taken out travellers can rest assured that it will last the whole year regardless of where they go or how often they travel
- Multi-trip insurance usually covers a wide range of sports and activities for a limited amount of days (e.g. golf, weddings, winter sports) although year-round cover for these activities can generally be added under a more expensive premium.
- Multi-trip policies are very flexible and allow travellers to customise the cover according to their own specifications
- Many providers allow multi-trip insurance to be combined with family policies, so that family members travelling regularly are also covered
Some disadvantages of multi-trip insurance include:
- Some policies can have hefty excess levels
- Many providers have a blanket exclusion policy for all terrorist activities and “acts of God” such as disruption caused by ash clouds for example
- Manual workers are usually excluded from business cover options
- If you go on a small number of sporting trips (e.g skiing, rock climbing) it may work out cheaper to buy single trip insurance as annual cover for activities can be very expensive.
- Many multi-trip policies won’t cover people over the age of 65 unlike single trip policies which rarely have an age limit
- Multi-trip insurance can work out unnecessarily expensive if fewer trips are made than predicted at the beginning of the policy
Many insurance providers will offer to cover different “extras” under your policy for an extra fee. The sorts of areas that these could include are:
- Emergency assistance 24 hours a day
- Hospital benefit
- Wedding cover
- Cover for mugging, hijack or other situations
- Acts of terrorism cover
- Business cover
- Scheduled airline failure
- Trip postponement
- Travel delay
- Stolen or Lost luggage
- Loss of valuables
- Pet care if you have to extend your holiday due to unforseen circumstances
- Cost of skiing if missed through illness (usually only applies with extra Winter sports cover)
- Piste closure (usually only applies with extra Winter sports cover)
In addition to the various “extras” covered by different policy providers, each insurance company offers different way of customising the multi trip policy, again for a fee, which varies depending on the customization required. These could include:
- Winter sports cover which includes piste closure or ski costs incurred through illness or injury.
- Golfing cover.
- Wedding cover.
- The option to exclude cancellation and curtailment, baggage and/or personal money cover for a discounted rate.
- The option to customise the number of days trips can last for (e.g. 45 days/ 60 days as opposed to the standard 31).
- Increased personal baggage cover.
- Cancellation top-up cover.
- Couple or family insurance (this normally works out cheaper than policies for two individuals).
- Option to waive excess.
So the benefits of an annual travel insurance policy are fairly clear, and well worth looking at if you have two or more trips planned for the coming year. There are several ways you can get insurance quotes these days, going into a broker’s office, calling various companies by phone, but perhaps the most common way these days is to go online and get online travel insurance quotes – which tend to give you a faster response, and many brokers allow you to buy your insurance online as well.
