Key Takeaways
- Travel insurance purchases are up 23% this summer according to IMG’s analysis of 30,000+ member itineraries, and the average insured trip cost rose 15% year-over-year. If your trip costs more than it did last year, your uninsured exposure is larger by the same proportion.
- Italy climbed from fourth to second among top U.S. international destinations; France entered the top five. European travel carries higher medical and evacuation cost risk than domestic or resort-Mexico trips, and most U.S. health plans pay poorly or slowly for international emergency care.
- Buy insurance within 14 to 21 days of your initial trip deposit if you want pre-existing condition coverage. That window closes and most travelers don’t know it exists until after it’s gone.
Travel insurance purchases are up 23% this summer compared to the same period last year. The average insured trip cost climbed 15% year-over-year. Average trip length increased to nearly 11 days, up from roughly 10 days in summer 2025.
Those numbers come from International Medical Group, a SiriusPoint company and one of the larger travel and medical insurance providers in the U.S. market. IMG published the analysis on May 27, 2026, drawing on itineraries from more than 30,000 members with travel planned between June 1 and August 31. The ITIJ picked up the findings on June 5.
The headline isn’t that more people are buying travel insurance. It’s that the financial exposure underneath each trip is growing faster than most travelers have stopped to recalculate.
What 15% Higher Trip Costs Actually Mean
Travel insurance is priced as a percentage of total insured trip cost, typically 4% to 10% depending on the plan, the traveler’s age, and the coverage tier. If your trip cost $6,000 last summer and runs $6,900 this summer, your premium scales with it. So does your uninsured downside.
The asymmetry here is worth sitting with. A missed connection that costs $800 to rebook costs $800 whether you’re insured or not. A medical evacuation from Italy that runs $75,000 to $100,000, and they do run that range, is the same number either way. As trip costs rise, the premium gap between insured and uninsured trips grows, but the catastrophic exposure gap grows faster.
IMG Chief Commercial Officer Justin Poehler noted that as trips become longer and more expensive, travelers are looking for coverage that’s flexible and reliable. Grant Hayes, IMG’s Global Head of Travel, put it directly: longer stays and higher trip costs naturally increase the importance of protecting the investment.
Where Travelers Are Going Matters for Claims Risk
IMG’s top five international destinations for U.S. travelers this summer: Mexico, Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France. Italy climbed from fourth to second. France entered the top five as a new entrant.
That shift toward European travel isn’t neutral from a coverage standpoint. A trip to a Mexican resort carries a different medical cost profile than ten days in Tuscany or Provence. Emergency care in the EU is generally high-quality. It is also expensive for non-EU visitors who lack travel medical coverage, and coordination with U.S. health insurance across international borders is slow, partial, and often requires the traveler to pay out of pocket and seek reimbursement later. Reimbursement is not the same as coverage at point of service.
Something I saw repeatedly during my time working in travel insurance: travelers consistently underestimated the medical component of their exposure and overweighted the cancellation component when deciding whether to buy. They worried about losing the trip deposit. The actual financial catastrophe risk was on the medical and evacuation side, a missed connection costs $800 whether you’re insured or not, but a medical evacuation from rural Italy runs $75,000 to $100,000, and that number doesn’t negotiate. With more Americans heading to Europe this summer, that calculation deserves a harder look.
How IMG’s Data Compares to What Squaremouth Found
Squaremouth published separate summer data that focused on different behavior. Their analysis found that Cancel for Any Reason purchases nearly doubled, rising from 6.9% to 13.5% of all travel insurance purchases, with an average insured trip cost of $9,668, up 24% from $7,794 in summer 2025.
IMG’s data captures broader uptake, 23% more travelers buying any form of travel protection, not just CFAR plans, with a 15% trip cost increase across their member base. Different datasets, different populations, different questions being asked. But both converge on the same underlying condition: the financial stakes for this summer are materially higher than last summer’s, and travelers are responding.
Squaremouth also found that travelers are purchasing insurance earlier, with the average time between trip deposit and insurance purchase dropping from 71 to 62 days. That matters more than it sounds. Most pre-existing condition waivers require coverage to be purchased within a defined window of the initial trip deposit, typically 14 to 21 days, depending on the policy. Travelers who wait past that window lose access to the waiver entirely, and most don’t know the window exists until it’s already closed.
What to Do Before You Book
If your trip cost has increased since last summer, revisit the coverage amount you declare when you buy insurance. Underinsuring, buying $5,000 in coverage on a $7,500 trip, can reduce your claim payout on a proportional basis in some policies. Check the plan language before you assume full protection.
Look at travel insurance cost for your specific itinerary before you finalize dates, not after. Rates can shift once airfare and hotel are confirmed, and some plans get more expensive to add after certain booking milestones. The options in best travel insurance vary significantly on medical and evacuation limits, that’s the line item to check first if you’re traveling anywhere in Europe this summer.
Skipping coverage on a $9,000 trip to save $400 made a different kind of calculation when the trip cost $6,000. The underlying numbers have moved. The decision to skip hasn’t gotten cheaper; it’s gotten more expensive.
