Vast majority of holidaymakers have no cancellation cover due to last minute travel insurance buys

It’s not exactly what you want to think about when booking a holiday but having no cancellation cover in place is leaving millions of travellers out of pocket should something go wrong.

Research from GoCompare shows the vast majority of holidaymakers only arrange travel insurance at the last minute.  Nearly 6 out of 10 (58%) of holidaymakers who bought through GoCompare in 2017 did so within one week of their departure date. Nearly half of those (28%) arranged it on the actual day their holiday began!

Only 15% of people had a policy in place more than a month before the departure date. Cancellation cover would enable a holidaymaker to reclaim the costs of their holiday, up to the cover limit and minus any excess, should certain circumstances arise before taking the trip.

GoCompare’s Consumer Advocate, Georgie Frost says: “You’ve booked the hotel, the flights, you’ve even bought the sun cream but what happens if something goes wrong and you have to cancel?

“It’s shocking that so many people are treating travel insurance as an afterthought, with many sorting it on the actual day their holiday begins, meaning they have no protection from the valuable cancellation cover provided by most single trip policies.”

GoCompare looked at 880 Single Trip travel insurance policies** and found that just 25 did not offer cancellation cover as standard. Of those which did, the cover offered ranged from £500 per person insured to £20,000 per person. Just over a tenth (11%) of the policies offered a discount if taken without cancellation cover. Unless you are travelling almost immediately Georgie Frost says it doesn’t make sense to give up this valuable cover.

“Insurers will only consider claims due to events travellers could not have known about before buying their insurance, therefore, the sooner the policy is bought, the more likely it is they’ll be covered if something happens between booking their holiday and their departure date. This could include a serious illness or injury affecting someone in the travelling party or a close relative who isn’t travelling with you but who you’d like to stay at home with. A major incident such as a serious fire or flood at home may be another reason why you might want to cancel or postpone.

 “However, if these events happen after you’d paid for your holiday but before you’d arranged your travel cover, you couldn’t then buy insurance retrospectively with a view to making a claim on the cancellation cover if the condition worsened. Insurers would argue that there was already an increased risk you’d cancel the holiday when you took out the insurance.”

For more information on travel insurance: http://www.gocompare.com/travel-insurance/

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 For further information please contact:

Anders Nilsson or Martyn John at GoCompare on 01633 654 054 / 01633 654 725

Gordon, Jason or Liz at MAW Communications on 01603 505 845

Follow GoCompare on Twitter; @GoCompare

About GoCompare:

GoCompare is a comparison website that enables people to compare the costs and features of a wide variety of insurance policies, financial products and energy tariffs.

GoCompare does not charge people to use its services, and it does not accept advertising or sponsored listings, so all product comparisons are unbiased. GoCompare makes its money through fees paid by the providers of products that appear on its various comparison services when a customer buys through the site.

GoCompare does not sell its customers’ data.

When it launched in 2006, it was the first comparison site to focus on displaying policy details rather than just listing prices, with the aim of helping people to make better-informed decisions when buying their insurance. GoCompare has remained dedicated to helping people choose the most appropriate products rather than just the cheapest, and has teamed up with Defaqto, the independent financial researcher, to integrate additional policy information into a number of its insurance comparison services. This allows people to compare up to an extra 30 features of cover.

GoCompare is the only comparison website to be invited to join the British Insurance Brokers’ Association (BIBA) and is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

For more information visit www.gocompare.com and www.gocomparegroup.com