Your friends are all playing in a villa in Málaga, Spain sitting on their patio cutting up impossibly juicy oranges, plucked from ancient trees, to put in their sangria. You are boiling the jug for the third time this evening to fill your hot water bottle up. Unfair! 

Hold the phone! You have snagged a $700 flight to the Northern Hemisphere, where the Earth is tilted towards the sun. You pack your red silk summer dress and those Manolo kitten heels; you decant your shampoo and conditioner into small travel bottles purchased at the Kathmandu sale, and you decide you are going to exclusively use your Curionoir 415AD pocket perfume as your scent while abroad. 

An email chirps. An advertisement for travel insurance pops into your ‘primary’ tab on your Gmail. Great information mining, excellent targeting. You Google ‘travel insurance reddit’. Five hours pass, you are no closer to choosing a provider. You open tab after tab trying to understand ‘underwriting’, and if the travel influencer-endorsed Safety Wing has ever actually accepted and paid a cent towards any claims. 

I slipped on a marble floor in Seoul, Korea in May. I broke my wrist, was transported by ambulance to hospital, and given the news that I had to go back to New Zealand to get surgery to put a plate with screws in it. Did I buy travel insurance? Yes. Did they accept my claim? Yes. Did they pay it out in full? Yes. Are all the photographs taken of me in Korea with a sling? Yes. 

I am not a statistician, but I put a poll on my Instagram story asking if people routinely purchase travel insurance for their trips. It settled to about 50/50. A few people messaged me horror stories. One person wrote of not having travel insurance and being hit by a car, subsequently being put into a coma and waking up to tens of thousands of dollars of medical costs. Shudder. 

It appears my independant travel insurance research stretches itself rather gracefully to be able to construct a top two list as recommended by people replying to my Instagram story. Two is barely a list, I know, but each was mentioned again and again.
The parameters were: 1. that they had to have made a claim, and 2. that it was accepted, and 3. they were paid out most, if not all, of expenses, and, finally, 4. that they were happy with how their situation was handled.

These are the two angels:

1. Southern Cross Travel Insurance

2. 1Cover Travel Insurance

This is a hand-on-heart, friend-to-friend recommendation. Buy travel insurance. I hope you do not have to use it.