One in five single-trip travel insurance claims in the UK gets rejected. Most of those failures have nothing to do with what the policy covers. They fail before an adjudicator ever reads the substance because the claimant missed something important when they took out the policy.
The three errors that kill claims early
Most rejected claims come down to one of three errors: not calling the insurer’s emergency line at the time of the incident, missing the notification window the policy sets for reporting a claim, or submitting inadequate documentation. These are procedural failures, and insurers use them routinely to decline claims that would otherwise be valid. Call the emergency line the moment something goes wrong, even if you are not sure you will claim. Note the time, the name of the person you spoke to, and what you were told. Keep every receipt, every police report number, every discharge letter. A claim without paperwork is a claim that loses.
Main causes for rejection
Undisclosed medical conditions. Forgetting, or choosing not to declare, past illnesses like asthma, high blood pressure, or previous operations. This is the single most common ground for rejection reaching the Ombudsman. Policy exclusions. Expecting cover for events or items the standard policy explicitly excludes, such as missed connections or storm-damaged belongings. The exclusion is usually there in the wording. It just isn’t where anyone looks until after the claim fails. Missing paperwork. No medical certificate, no police report for a theft, no original purchase receipt. The claim can be entirely valid and still lose on this alone.
How to protect your claim
Declare everything. Answer every medical question accurately, even for managed or minor conditions. A condition you think is trivial is exactly the one an insurer uses to void the policy.
Read the exclusions. Check the small print for activity limits, alcohol clauses, and unattended-baggage rules before you travel, not after something goes wrong.
Keep documents. Save every receipt, medical note, and message from your travel provider to your phone the moment you get it. Reconstructing paperwork weeks later is how claimants lose the paper trail that would have won.
What actually comes up at the Financial Ombudsman Service
When rejections reach the FOS, the leading grounds are undeclared pre-existing medical conditions, activity outside the policy scope, unattended belongings, alcohol-related incidents, lack of medical evidence, and disputes over the excess or policy limits. Some of these are genuine exclusions. Others are disputes about evidence or interpretation, which is exactly where an independent adjudicator is useful. One point on FCDO travel advice: travelling against an ‘all travel’ or ‘all but essential’ warning is very likely to invalidate cover entirely. If the advice changes after you have already departed, your cover normally continues, but check this with your insurer before you go, not after.
Why appealing is worth your time
Travel insurance complaints to the FOS rose more than 58 per cent year-on-year in a single quarter of 2025, reaching around 1,390 cases, one of the highest levels since the immediate post-pandemic period. Over the past five years, travel insurance has posted a 39 per cent upheld rate across almost 22,100 complaints, the highest of any major UK general insurance line. In the third quarter of 2025 that rate stood at around 35 per cent, meaning more than one in three complaints was resolved against the insurer. The FOS is free and independent. Those numbers make the case for appealing plainly.
The appeal sequence, in order
First, submit a written complaint to the insurer. State clearly that you are making a formal complaint, not asking a question. The insurer then has up to eight weeks to issue a final response. If eight weeks pass without one, or if you receive one and disagree with it, you have six months from the date of that final response to refer the case to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Do not miss that six-month window. After it closes, your route to the FOS is gone.
Before you write your complaint, request everything the insurer used to assess your claim: medical reports, internal notes, policy documents, correspondence. You are entitled to this. Read it. Insurers sometimes rely on documents that contain errors, or that do not say what the rejection letter claims they say. If your rejection rests on a medical report, check every detail in it against your own records.
A note on pre-existing conditions: from January 2026, if a mainstream insurer loads more than £200 in additional premium for a declared medical condition, FCA rules require them to point you towards the MoneyHelper specialist directory. If that did not happen, and you were priced out of appropriate cover, it is worth raising in your complaint.
The one thing not worth appealing is a rejection that genuinely matches the policy exclusions and the facts. Know the difference before you spend the eight weeks finding out.
