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What's the deal with travel insurance these days?

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The insurance companies are so clever now.  They have a long list of intrusive questions about everything in your life, and naturally enough dig out risk from every single applicant.  You're too young, or too old.  You eat too much, or too little.  You drive too much, or you don't drive enough.  Everyone is a risk (sure) and as we get older, health risks increase to the point that travel insurance is often completely unaffordable.  It sometimes seems that if you can afford insurance, you don't need it and if you can't afford it, you really do need it.  As everyone faces this, wouldn't travel insurance companies be more sensible to even out the costs for all travellers and keep everyone moving?  Or should older people be grounded (by the cost), and left only to pay for their children's travel?

Travel insurance companies and intrusive questions Travel Insurance Companies, and especially web-based ones advertised via so-called comparison sites like to cherry-pick.  They want to maximise their profits.  They want to maximise their take.  Their insurance policies are often totally deceitful.

Insurance companies often have hundreds of ways of getting out of paying up when they have to/ought to.  Travel insurance companies are renowned for doing just this.

High levels of excess.
Impossible and Unreasonable Conditions in the Policy Contracts.
Impossible and Unreasonable Conditions Imposed on Claims, and the Claims Procedure.
Exclusion of anyone from buying a policy who might be at or have the slightest risk.

One faces a Kafka Castle if one needs to sign up for a travel insurance or to make a claim against it.

And have you noticed that nearly all travel insurances advertised by Web Comparison Sites are more or less underwritten by identically the same people, namely Cigna.  What kind of commercial competition is that?  What is the EU doing about these insurance scams?  Or are all the Euro MPs on the insurance companies' Payola?


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Lucy Von

Lucy Von

As everyone faces this, wouldn't travel insurance companies be more sensible to even out the costs for all travellers and keep everyone moving. Brick Masonry
25/11/21 Lucy Von
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Bureaucracy Investigator

Bureaucracy Investigator

Unreasonable conditions:

Not being able to give you the costs up front for a extended trip longer than their standard policy allows.

Trip length limits in policies on standard trips are far too short.

Age limits in an era when we are all living much much longer

Medical condition restrictions for conditions which happened more than 5 or 7 years prior, and for which one has been declared by the medics as clear of the condition.

The insistence that one records trivial, almost irrelevant medical conditions.

The insistence that one must have a return ticket back home booked [and paid for] before one commences a journey/trip.

Not being able to take out a resonably costed travel insurance after one has commenced a journey.
16/02/17 Bureaucracy Investigator
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