Martin Lewis ‘hugely important warning’ for travel insurance

On his BBC podcast, he has urged: “If you’ve booked or are booking a holiday (this is) a hugely important warning for you to make sure you get your travel insurance ASAB – as soon as you booked, and if you’ve already booked, that means just do it now. Just get it as quickly as possible.”

As he explains: “half the point of travel insurance is covering you for things that may happen before you go that stop you going, and if you leave it until last minute to get your travel insurance, and something happens, well, you won’t be covered.”

He continues: “So what does having it in place ASAB mean? Well, if it’s a single trip policy, it’s really easy. Let’s take you go away the first of August to the eighth of August. You get a single trip policy. Now, from the first of August to the eighth of August, you give those cover dates, you pay for it. Now you’ve got your policy in place.

“If it’s an annual policy that covers all your trips away in the year, you want to always have a live annual policy. So if you don’t have an annual policy, you get one now, but you need to have the start date being today. You don’t leave it until the first of August and try and book it in advance.”

How about if your annual policy runs out before you travel?

“If you already have a policy and that is in place until the end of your holiday, you’re fine,” he says.

“But if your current annual policy stops before your holiday date, let’s say it stops in April and you’re going on holiday in August, you will want to get a new policy that starts the day after your old policy ends.

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“So you have continuous cover going all the way through. Now, you can generally only get annual policies up to 90 days in advance. So if something were to happen now for a holiday in August, the cover that ends in April, most, not all, annual travel policies will cover you even though the holiday is after their end date.

“If the incident happens, now, that stops you getting it, but as soon as you can, you get cover that butts up against it.”

He adds that he’s put lots more questions and answers on this type of travel insurance issue in his podcast, “as well as loads of life lessons worth listening to if you’ve booked or are booking a holiday”.