Why you shouldn’t buy travel insurance

Skipping travel insurance often feels like a small victory in a world that tries to upsell you at every turn. You buy a flight, a tiny box pops up asking if you want to add cover for peace of mind, and your instinct is to save the money and click away. If you enjoy optimising cards for lounge access, hunting promo fares, and building a lean travel stack on your phone, declining insurance can look like the savvy move. The trouble is that self-insuring is not the same as being smart with money. It is a choice to accept the full downside of travel mishaps while giving up the key advantages that good risk pooling and professional assistance are designed to provide. The difference shows up when real life refuses to stay tidy, when a sore ankle becomes a clinic visit, when a bag goes missing at the worst possible connection, or when a delay quietly turns into an unplanned overnight stay. In those moments, the math of self-insuring stops being theoretical and becomes a test of liquidity, access, and stamina.

Self-insuring sounds straightforward. You tell yourself you will handle whatever happens out of pocket. If the airline loses your bag, you will buy clothes. If a stomach bug knocks you flat, you will pay for the doctor. If weather wipes out your connection, you will cover the reroute and get on with the trip. That mental picture assumes the worst case is a few hundred dollars and a mildly inconvenient afternoon. Reality is far more expensive, and it escalates quickly. Routine outpatient care in a major city can cost more than the flight you were proud to book on sale. A single night of observation in a private hospital can wipe out a month of careful saving. An emergency dental repair is rarely cheap, and an evacuation is the kind of bill that sounds like the price of a used car. Even middle-sized problems clear the four-figure line with ease, and the gap between what you imagine and what you must actually pay tends to appear when you are tired, stressed, and far from home.

The first quiet flaw in self-insuring is liquidity. On paper you might have the funds. In the moment you may not. Credit limits exist, and foreign transactions can trigger fraud checks that freeze a card just when you need it. ATMs impose withdrawal caps and fees, and sometimes a machine simply refuses to cooperate. Hotel desks and clinic counters care about how you will pay in the next five minutes, not about your ability to sort reimbursements in two weeks. Insurance changes the sequence. Instead of negotiating every step while unwell or stranded, you have a hotline, a claim number, and often a direct settlement path that gets care moving first and slides the paperwork later. Money that arrives when the crisis has passed is still money, but money that unlocks a bed, a doctor, or a confirmed seat at the right moment is something more important. It is control.

Time is the second flaw. People who decline cover think they are saving themselves forms and small print. What they are really doing is choosing a future that includes more calls, more transfers, and more dead ends. Third-party sites point you to airlines. Airlines point you back to third-party sites. Hotels shrug. You sit on hold while your battery drains and your roaming plan burns. Insurance does not erase bureaucracy, yet it often gives you a direct path to someone whose job is to remove obstacles. A claims portal with clear prompts, an agent who can confirm benefits, and a support line that actually answers create a different kind of trip when things go sideways. You still need receipts, reports, and boarding passes, but you are not begging a chatbot for the right form while you are shivering in an airport chair.

Many travellers rely on credit card benefits and assume that the card’s coverage is enough. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is surprisingly narrow. Benefits can require that you charge the entire fare to the card to activate cover. They may protect only the primary cardholder and ignore companions. They may exclude pre-existing conditions or anything remotely adventurous. A generous-sounding cap for medical care may be designed for stitches, not scans. Some trip delay benefits only kick in after a long threshold, which is not helpful when a missed connection strands you for a few hours in a city with limited late-night options. Booking through an aggregator can void certain protections that assume direct purchase. The solution is not to abandon cards, but to treat their protection as a helpful layer rather than a complete safety net. Reading the benefits guide like a menu you plan to order from is not paranoia. It is preparation.

A related myth insists that young, healthy travellers only need cover for lost luggage. Optimism is a lovely trait and a poor substitute for arithmetic. The most common medical claims are not dramatic. Food that disagrees with you, a fall on stairs, an infection that needs antibiotics, a cracked tooth, a dog bite that requires a precautionary shot. None of these are good travel stories, but each one can turn into a meaningful bill. Luggage matters for convenience and comfort, yet medical cover is the line item that protects your finances from lurching into a spiral. When people warn that self-insuring for travelling is a mistake, they are not scolding you for being casual about a hoodie. They are asking you to avoid debts and delays that follow you home long after the trip has ended.

Buying insurance is not about fear, it is about alignment. The right plan matches your destinations, your activities, and your tolerance for admin. City hopping with cafes and museums calls for strong medical benefits, clear trip interruption terms, and delay coverage that activates early enough to be useful. Surfing, diving, motorbikes, and mountain trails require named add-ons rather than generic language that looks broad and pays narrowly. If you need proof of cover for a visa, it is not enough to hold a policy. You need a certificate that shows dates, territories, and minimum medical limits exactly as the consulate requires. The cheapest plan that fails a paperwork check is not a bargain. It is stress.

The choice between single-trip and annual cover is a question of behaviour. If you travel more than a handful of times a year, an annual plan often wins on price and sanity because it removes one decision before every booking. If you take a single long journey or travel rarely, a single-trip plan is fine and often cheaper. What matters is recognising your patterns. Last-minute bookers who bounce across borders benefit from flexibility, multi-country zones, and easy date changes. Slow, planned travel can be optimised for price. Admin burden is like a carry-on bag. If it slows you down, you picked the wrong one.

There is a lingering fear that insurance invites red tape. That reputation comes from older models. Many providers now allow photo uploads of receipts and PDFs of boarding passes, process certain delay claims automatically after airline data confirms the facts, and pay out set amounts for specific events so you are not arguing about sandwiches. If two plans look similar on paper, choose the one whose app is clear, whose hotline is responsive, and whose reviews praise payouts rather than marketing. In travel, speed matters as much as generosity.

The price hurdle is easier to clear with the right question. Ask yourself the amount you would pay to make a travel problem disappear inside an hour. The answer often includes the cost of a last-minute hotel night, a new flight, and enough food to function. For most travellers that number already exceeds the premium for a solid plan. The premium is not a bet that disaster will happen. It is the cost of buying a better decision space when your energy and leverage are low. If you never claim, that is not wasted money. That is the best version of the outcome.

Exclusions deserve respect, not fear. Contracts must define boundaries. Your job is to ensure those boundaries fit your trip. If you plan to rent a scooter in Bali, buy a plan that mentions scooters, helmets, and engine size. If you carry a work laptop, make sure your valuables limit matches the reality of a device that cannot be replaced on a whim. If you live with a pre-existing condition, seek plans that allow declared cover rather than hoping a claim slips through unnoticed. Transparency beats cleverness every time because the goal is not to outwit an insurer. The goal is to get paid when the facts are on your side.

Cross-border payment friction is another reason self-insuring stumbles. Paying large foreign bills on a card that charges conversion fees and interests can turn a manageable cost into a painful one. Policies that settle directly with providers, or reimburse you in your home currency at a fair rate, remove the exchange rate roulette. In places where clinics prefer cash, a guarantee of payment letter can unlock treatment while billing gets sorted later. It is a dull phrase that becomes a lifeline when a receptionist is asking how you will pay before anyone is willing to help.

None of this works without basic documentation habits. Keep digital copies of your passport, visas, and cards in a secure cloud folder. Save receipts and tickets as you go. Snap photos of departure boards that show delays, and ask for written confirmations when tours are cancelled. Claims teams are simply people verifying events. When you make their task easy, money moves faster. When you arrive with a story and no proof, your case sinks into a slow line of avoidable back and forth. The aim is not to argue at length. The aim is to make paying you the obvious step.

A small companion practice helps. For every trip, build a one-page digital note with your policy number, claim phone number, the nearest embassy or consulate, and a personal spend threshold that you will not second-guess. Write a sentence that says you will spend up to a set amount to resolve health or safety issues without hesitation. This rule short circuits the internal debate that costs hours and complicates problems that could be solved quickly. You can optimise later, but you cannot buy back time or reverse an illness that got worse while you hunted for a perfect workaround.

Bundled cover at checkout from airlines and online travel agencies deserves a sober view. Sometimes it is helpful. Often it is narrower than it looks, with a focus on trip issues rather than medical needs, or it may push you to a third-party administrator that works more slowly than a dedicated insurer. Treat this kind of add-on as a supplement rather than your core defense. A better architecture for people who prefer everything in one app is to maintain comprehensive medical and evacuation cover with a reputable provider and add inexpensive trip benefits at purchase only when the numbers make sense.

Long-stay travellers and digital nomads need a different approach. Traditional trip policies assume a clear start and end date. Life across borders blurs those lines, which is why international health plans and nomad-friendly policies exist. They cost more, but they are built for the calendar that doubles as your address. If you freelance, treat the premium like coworking or faster internet. Your income depends on your body and your laptop. Protect both as essential business assets.

There is a final benefit that rarely appears in marketing copy because it is hard to capture in a chart. Insurance reduces decision clutter when you are at your worst. When you are sick, cold, hungry, jet-lagged, or just overwhelmed, you do not need more choices. You need a path. Automatic investing works for the same reason. We build rails that carry us toward acceptable outcomes even on bad days. Travel insurance is rails for a chaotic environment. It is not a wish for trouble. It is a plan that acknowledges the world’s randomness and refuses to let randomness own your finances.

The conclusion is not complicated. Money is powerful when you can decide calmly and act efficiently. It is surprisingly weak when you are stranded and uncertain. Self-insuring looks like control until it reveals itself as a bet that everything will stay easy. Travel rarely promises that. You can enjoy hunting deals and still respect risk. You can love points and still love a policy number that unlocks a human who can help at midnight. You can be young and healthy and still prefer a structure that turns a bad day into a manageable task on a phone screen.

Buy cover that matches who you are and how you move, keep your documents in order, and carry a simple plan for spending and calling for help. You are not trying to predict catastrophe. You are choosing to keep small problems small and prevent medium ones from becoming large. That is what sound financial tools do. They turn volatility into something you can absorb without breaking your stride. In that light, the case against self-insuring on a trip is not moral or dramatic. It is practical. Insurance protects the version of you who is tired, confused, or hurting far from home. That person deserves a clear path, and a good policy buys it at a price that is almost always smaller than the first real problem you would otherwise face alone.