Travel insurance: are you covered for Covid-19?

Most travel insurance offers limited protection for holidaymakers, so if you’re planning a holiday, make sure your policy covers everything you need..

Passengers boarding a plane
Check your travel insurance policy before you board
(Image credit: © Peter MacDiarmid/Shutterstock)

Vaccine passports. Coronavirus tests before departure and return. Sudden reclassification of a country’s risk status while you are abroad. The threat of an expensive stay in a government-run quarantine hotel on return. International travel in the pandemic era will make any traveller nostalgic for the time when all they had to worry about were long queues, rip-off charges and lost luggage.

So if you’re planning a holiday, make sure you check how these risks will affect your travel insurance. Insurers have updated their terms since the first lockdowns in spring 2020 and most now offer some form of “coronavirus cover”, but the exact details vary widely.

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Markets editor

Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019. 

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere. 

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful. 

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.