Last week my husband and I booked a two week holiday on the wonderful Orkney Islands. All that beautiful scenery and hopefully no chance of a mobile phone signal, we would be alone with the birds and the wildlife for two whole weeks – what a treat!

I was as stunned as could be when the travel agent added an extra £27.50 to the bill for travel insurance. Why on earth would we need that, I thought. Did they think we came down in the last shower? Why would we need travel insurance for a trip to another British destination? It’s not like we’d have to pay for hospital treatment as the NHS is free and we’re in Orkney after all, not Timbuktu.

When I got back home, I started to think about it all in more detail…

Things can go wrong on holiday, whether you are abroad or in Britain. I made a list to try and get the facts straight in my head:

· What would happen if one of us were taken ill before we departed? We’d have to cancel, and both the ferries and the hotels would not take cancellations.
· Both our parents are getting older and God forbid anything should happen to them, but if it did, we’d of course have to cancel the holiday.
· My husband or I could be called up for jury service, which as everyone knows, you have to do.
· What if there was a major delay at the ferry? We’d have to stay in John O’Groats for the night, an extra expense.
· What is someone stole our luggage?
· I bought a very expensive digital camera to zoom in on the puffins and seals, what if I lost or accidentally broke it?
· If either of us were hospitalised, we’d want to be transferred back to our local hospital in Manchester to be near our family and friends.

After writing the list, I remembered our Home and Contents insurance policy, surely that would cover me if the luggage or camera was lost travelling in the UK. I dug out the policy, and was glad I did. Our policy covered “personal possessions” but only if they were listed. I’d only got the camera a fortnight ago, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ring the insurers and have it added onto the policy as a valuable item.

Then I had another thought. If I needed to make a claim on the Home and Contents insurance, that would be the end of a very healthy no claims discount. That would be a major disadvantage to making a claim. A ten year claim free record and the premiums were still coming in at £305 a year. I made a mental note to shop around when the home and contents insurance came up for renewal.

Minute by minute, £27.50 for a travel insurance policy was starting to look more and more like a good deal.

Reading this, you’ll already have gathered that I have a tight hand on my purse. I have to, or my husband would spend it all! So the next step, after deciding that travel insurance could be worthwhile after all, was to get on the Internet and see if I could get a cheaper deal than the one offered by the travel agent.

Some of the websites I visited didn’t offer single holiday insurance policies for holidays within the UK, but after 10 minutes of searching I found what I was looking for - a travel policy at over £10 less than the travel agent’s quote!

I took the time to read the small print, to see exactly what the cover included. Everything I had jotted down was included, and even better, they’d even pay us £30 if the ferry was delayed for up to 12 hours. The insurance also offered us the option to cancel the trip and get a full refund, very generous I thought!

It was all too good to be true, so I had a look at the exclusions – the things they wouldn’t cover us for. The insurance wouldn’t cover a trip if it was for less than 2 nights away, or if it was less than 25 miles from home. We would also have to pay an excess of £30 towards any claim, which seemed quite reasonable to me.

I decided to get the insurance, and five minutes later, the credit card details were input and the transaction completed. We were insured, and it cost us next to nothing – easy peasy!