You’re putting the finishing touches to plans for an epic adventure which you expect to keep you on the road for several months. You start looking at travel insurance options, and you see an ad flash up for annual policies at fantastic prices.
Perfect, you think. I won’t be gone for more than 12 months. That will give me more than enough time, and plenty of flex so I don’t have to fix an end date to my journey right away.
This is just one example of where you have to be careful about some of the jargon used by travel insurance companies. Annual policies do what they say – they cover you for up to 12 months. But not for up to 12 months continuous travel.
In fact, the correct name for these types of policy is annual multi-trip travel insurance – which is as much to say, they provide cover for multiple trips within a 12 month period. They are therefore designed more for the ‘frequent flier’ than the long-term traveller. Indeed, most such policies will set a time limit on individual trips of something in the region of 50 days / eight weeks.
If you want to be away for longer than this, but then again wouldn’t mind heading off somewhere else later in the year, one option is to look at adding single trip extensions to your annual cover. But certainly, if you want to travel for more than three months at a time, your best bet is to look into long stay travel insurance policies instead.
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