When travelling abroad, there can be lots of additional costs that may occur if you are not careful with your planning. With the current coronavirus pandemic, planning ahead is even more essential, as the coronavirus pandemic is a major cause of additional costs and even trip cancellations. Listed below are several tips you can use to ensure that you don’t incur extra costs when travelling abroad during the pandemic.
Make sure you have comprehensive travel insurance
It’s always important to get comprehensive travel insurance when going abroad, even when the world is not in the middle of a global pandemic. Different levels of cover exist to cover different things, so it is important for potential travellers to research the different policies available, to find the right one for your trip.
Many comprehensive travel insurance policies now include cover for costs incurred due to the coronavirus, meaning that if you are unable to travel due to contracting the virus, or your trip is cancelled due to an increase in cases, you may be able to find insurance to cover covid disruptions, thus avoiding having to pay for a trip you can’t take. Travel insurance can also help to cover for other additional costs, such as medical expenses.
Turn your data roaming off
Using your mobile phone overseas can be very expensive. Whereas roaming charges were covered when the UK was part of the EU, most phone companies have now added data roaming charges back on for British travellers to Europe, so it is important to be aware of this, in order to make sure that your data roaming is turned off.
Wi-Fi is now available in most places, so you can use this as an alternative instead. Please also note that it can be more expensive to use your mobile phone for text messages and phone calls when abroad, so it may be best to use a service like WhatsApp or Facetime to contact family and friends back home via a Wi-Fi connection instead. Information about data roaming charges in the EU can be found here.
Get a bank account designed for travelling abroad
It can be quite expensive to use your debit or credit card abroad, with fees often applied to transactions made using a bank from another country. One option to avoid this is to use a bank such as Monzo or Starling – these are legitimate banks that usually operate via an app on your mobile phone, with no fees applied to transactions in foreign countries. This will make it a lot cheaper for you to travel abroad, meaning you also don’t need to carry lots of cash around with you.
