Do You Trust Travel Insurance?

Dear Reader,

Have you ever reached the final step of booking a flight, glanced at the total amount, then hesitated for a second over a small extra charge?

For a few hundred rupees more, the website offers to “secure your trip.” You’re already running late. You don’t want to read the fine print. So you click yes, just in case.

Sachin, an IT consultant in Bengaluru, decided to click that “secure my trip” option too.

“I paid 300 rupees for it,” Sachin told The Signal Brief. “I wanted insurance in case the flight got delayed or cancelled.” He added that last December’s IndiGo disruptions pushed him to buy it.

The flight did get delayed. Just not enough for him to file a claim.

“It was bittersweet, I guess,” Sachin said.

Like Sachin, many other Indians are buying travel insurance, especially for overseas trips. Between FY 2019 and FY 2025, the overseas segment grew by 91%. Last year alone, nearly one crore Indians bought overseas travel insurance. Domestic travel insurance is growing too, as travellers become more aware of risk, according to Meet Kapadia of Policybazaar.

But even as more of us tick that box before paying for flights or train tickets, many consumers say travel insurance doesn’t work when they actually need it.

The data reflects this too. According to IRDAI’s annual reports, incurred claim ratios in travel insurance are far lower than in other insurance categories. Over the past three years, overseas travel insurance paid out about 49% of the premiums collected. Domestically, that figure drops to just 10%. In comparison, life and health insurance typically pay out between 60% and 90%.

“We don’t actually see many wrongful rejections in travel insurance,” said Krish Desai, co-founder of The Insurance Bar, a firm that helps consumers challenge denied claims. One reason, he said, is that premiums are so low that many people don’t even file claims. Another is that most consumers don’t fully read or understand policy terms. In part because of how opaque these policies are, by design.

We noticed this while checking MakeMyTrip too.

At checkout, the website gives you a simple choice: “Secure your trip” or “No, I don’t want to secure my trip.”

If you want to know what “securing your trip” actually means, you click a separate button.

That opens a pop-up.

Inside that pop-up is another link.

Click that, and you finally land on a page titled Terms and Conditions.

By then, most people have already given up.

If you want to learn more, check out the latest episode of The Signal Brief. In it, we break down why travel insurance is booming, and why it so often disappoints.

You can find The Signal Brief on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Thank you once again for listening and supporting us. We’d love to hear from you; write to us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram or X at @thesignaldotco.

Best,
Kudrat
on behalf of The Core

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