Do You Need Travel Insurance for Italy?

For your first—or fifteenth—trip to Italy, is travel insurance necessary?

Now that you've planned your trip, and you're wondering what's next, it's time to talk about insurance.

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Before I get started, I do want to mention that this article will make use of affiliate links for both World Nomads and Travelex, two well-regarded travel insurance companies. We don't work for or represent either company, however, if you use our affiliate link to insure your trip, we receive a small commission, which Only A Bag will use towards maintaining the website and podcast.

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So, let's get into it. Do you need travel insurance for Italy? First, it's helpful to know that travel insurance is usually broken down into two different branches: travel insurance and travel health insurance.

Travelex, a standard in the industry for years, is a great travel insurance option.

Travel insurance will cover things like missing bags, a missed or cancelled flight, an overbooked hotel room, getting sick and being unable to go, and any major weather disasters that might happen. This is just the broad strokes, with some insurance options covering more eventualities and other options covering fewer.

Travel health insurance is better considered emergency travel health insurance. You can't get routine work done on travel health insurance—like a check-up, a cavity filled, or routine blood work—but if you were to crack a tooth or break a bone, that's when you're covered.

Do you need travel health insurance for Italy?

We touch on it briefly in this article about going to the Emergency Room, and the truth is, it's highly personal. As in, it depends on your specific situation.

As a tourist, you can go to any emergency room in Italy if something were to happen. If, for some reason, the doctors or nurses deem it "not an emergency", then you'll be charged. The price is different based on the region, but where I live (in Campania, which is also the region for Naples, Sorrento, and the Amalfi Coast), the cost for a non-emergency is capped at €25 (about $28 USD). So if you're feeling seriously ill or if you've hurt yourself, it's often better to go to the emergency room, even if you don't think you need to.

This is all to say, the emergency room covers a lot of the basic emergencies.

What about the non-emergencies?

Well, as I mentioned, you can't actually use most travel health for non-emergencies. That said, we have an English friend who used her travel health insurance to cover an emergency flight (and helicopter ride) from southern Italy to a hospital in Switzerland. So, if you have the money, it's not a terrible idea by any measure. Likewise, some companies (like World Nomads and Travelex) don't separate the two, so if you buy one, you'll get the other anyway.

If you're interested in travel insurance, World Nomads is a great option.

Now, let's talk about travel insurance.

When do you buy travel insurance for Italy?

If you've ever booked a flight in the past few years, you might have noticed that little box offering insurance. It might have always been there, but recently, it's incredibly obvious. They ask if you're sure you don't want insurance roughly nine times before you can check out; it's almost to the point that I'm not sure if they're threatening to lose my luggage or not.

"You sure you don't want to cover this trip? Would be a real shame if something happened to your bags..."

The best time to purchase travel insurance is typically after you've purchased everything else. Most insurance companies will ask you for details on what you purchased, when you're leaving, etc. so it only makes sense to purchase the insurance last.

So I'd recommend holding off until the flights, hotels, and any tours are booked, and going a step farther, even waiting until after you've purchased new luggage, clothes, and any other incidentals you might need, that way you have receipts if that ever become necessary (though, with lost luggage, it usually isn't).

So, do you need travel insurance for Italy?

The truth is, we rarely use travel insurance of any kind: flight, hotel, rental car (though we've started with rental cars) because it was often out of our budget.

This has often been to our detriment.

When things went well, we thought, "See, didn't need that travel insurance after all!"

And when things went poorly, we stood for hours in lines, trying to get a flight rebooked, or trying to find another hotel room while simultaneously asking, "Why did you double-book our room?" in the most polite way possible.

In fact, the first time we used travel insurance is when a rental car company tried to claim that we damaged the car. They ended up charging us roughly $600, which the insurance covered immediately, which was the first time we realized "What were we doing without this?"

This is all to say, do you need travel insurance? No, of course not. Would it help make your trip just a little more relaxing? 100%.