CAN WE EXTEND OUR TRAVEL POLICY?
Have a question? Ask our expert Simon Calder
Q We have annual travel insurance which cover us for 45 days per holiday. Our 2017 holiday is 50 days long. Can we buy travel insurance for just the five days of additional cover? Our current insurer states that we have to take out an entirely new policy with them for 50 days. They are saying we would not get any money back on our current policy, which does not run out until April 2017. Have we any other options?
Neville C Archibald
A I’m delighted that you’re able to take a 50-day holiday next year. However, you have been correctly
advised, up to a point. From an insurer’s point of view, an annual travel policy could represent an openended exposure to claims, unless limits are applied. Many policies limit each trip to 30 days, so yours is more generous than the norm. From your point of view, it seems ridiculous that an insurer won’t take an additional payment from you to extend the trip limit by five days. But it presumably has concluded that to do so would be increase its overall risk profile.
So you’ll need a fresh policy – and you’ll probably find that 50 days of cover costs as much as, or possibly more than, annual cover. The reason: when insurers are calculating premiums, they estimate that the average policyholder will not spend more than a month in total travelling during the course of a year.
You have not been correctly advised, though, about where you should get the fresh policy. It may be that your current insurer can make a decent offer, but shop around. Please do so quickly: I can imagine that a 50-day holiday comes at a high price, and at present you have no cover in case you need to cancel.
Every day, our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder