Travel insurance: do I really need it?

One well-travelled reader regales us with tales of his cover-free adventures... but can we all afford to be so oblivious to risk? Regular readers of my column will know that complications, costs and pitfalls of insurance is a subject I regularly try to tackle. Often I get follow-up inquiries from readers as a result. But the last article, two weeks ago, drew a very unusual response. Travel insurance: do I really need it?

It came from a reader called Edward (he asked me not to mention his surname) and here, slightly edited, is what he said: "I am in my mid-sixties, and have been travelling regularly since my late teens. At present I live in China, and take about 60 to 70 flights a year, both inside the country and abroad – including to some dodgy places. I have never once paid for travel insurance. Obviously many of my journeys were made before I (or almost anybody) had a credit card, which made things a little bit harder (imagine having plenty of the wrong currency, and no banks open). And with no mobile phone. In spite of these problems, insurance has always seemed to me a waste of money. "Naturally I've had mishaps and dozens of cancelled flights. Among the worst incidences: 1968 – stuck in Amman in transit when a war broke out and all flights were cancelled. I treated it as an unexpected opportunity to visit the city. 1972 – Rome. All documents and money stolen. I was repatriated by the British Embassy, by train, using a temporary document (one sheet of paper) – I had to pay back the fare on arrival, and received nothing else, surviving until Dover on fellow passengers' snacks. 1974 – south-eastern Algeria. Imprisoned for a week (for staying in a hotel with a woman to whom I wasn't married). That was pretty bad, but I was eventually released after my girlfriend travelled to Algiers. 1978 – in Kabul when the Soviet army invaded. A bit hairy. 1979 – drove from Tehran to Italy, through the border at Trieste – alone in the car and without insurance on the car or myself (at the end of the revolution, so it wasn't really possible).

"I think that's enough to make the point. I've always put these incidents down to experience, and dined off some of them for years. Never once have I been tempted to pay for insurance. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that in the end I've lost far less cash than I would have paid for policies. Moreover, many people I know have been ripped off by insurance companies that refuse to pay or find ways of paying less than the customer expected. Do you sincerely believe that travel insurance would have been worth it for me in the past, or will be in the future?" That's all well and good, I responded by email, but what if, God forbid, he had a heart attack while in, say, California and was in intensive care and kept in hospital for several months? He could be facing a medical bill of hundreds of thousands of pounds. "It might be a good idea for me not to go the States again. But I probably will, and accept the risk," said Edward. He later emailed me back with a further reflection: "If you have a heart attack before you're 40, you're stuffed anyway; after 40 it's not worth going to California." Obviously Edward's approach is not for everyone. He is clearly a highly experienced traveller, he apparently enjoys taking risks, and phrases like "what if" don't play on his mind. But he did make me think again about the whole question of travelling without insurance. After all, very few of us would bother to insure ourselves if we were spending a couple of days in London, so why do we rush out and buy cover when we jump on to a train to Paris for a weekend break? We are just as likely to get mugged, or have things stolen, in London as Paris. As long as we have an EHIC (see below), we are entitled to emergency medical treatment in France. If our train is cancelled, we might have to pay for another night in a hotel; if we had to return early we might have to buy a new ticket – but such scenarios apply both to London and to Paris. For most people, too, in the very unlikely event that things do go wrong, the costs of having to get yourself home, or even of losing your holiday altogether because you are forced to cancel, might be painful and annoying, but they are not likely to be financially disastrous. And it is important to remember Edward's point that even if you have insurance, you can never be sure it will pay out when you need it. Very few cover money lost through financial failures and all policies are littered with exclusions and limits, including one that invariably excludes cover if you have consumed alcohol – not an unknown phenomenon among holidaymakers and travellers.