Wondering what 2nd home owners do regarding travel/health insurance. We are UK residents and apart from a few nights in hotels on the journey from the UK to 2nd home in France we will be in one home or the other. We don’t need standard travel insurance as things like flight cancellation are irrelevant, pretty much as is lost luggage. We will obviously have home contents insurance, EHIC (or equivalent), car insurance. Trying to work out if we ought to take out further insurance - and if so - what else do we need to cover? Plus most standard annual policies only allow for 120 days travel and we hope to exceed that! Any additional trips elsewhere E.g the US we can cover on one off trip insurance if there isn’t a suitable annual policy /or if we don’t need an annual policy. Any suggestions please?
The first thing to understand is in which legal situation you’ll be in. If you intend to stay in France or in any country in the EU for more than 90 days every consecutive 180 days then you’ll need a visa to remain that long in the EU. As you may not want to renew your visa every 6 months you may want to consider the VLS-TS in France (which allows for stays all across the EU without any particular limit).
This needs to be sorted out first as this will influence my response massively.
There is also the matter of being covered in the US. Honestly it’s best to get it covered “on off” as you mentioned, only when you go there as getting a policy that could cover you in the US usually makes the premium to skyrocket.
Hi Fabien, many thanks for your reply. I was going to message you once ‘all responses were in’! We do not currently intend to exceed the 90/180 days although we will be pretty close hopefully. Certainly more than the standard insurance cover of a maximum of 120 days per annum. We then plan to probably make one other trip each year - sometimes Schengen but other times (like this year) elsewhere. All advice gratefully received. Thanks Sue
ok, so you’ll need a policy that we call “Private Health Insurance” or “Private Medical Insurance”, also known in France as “Santé 1er Euro”.
We have an online calculator for such plans, just consider you’re applying for a long term visa and the calculator will show you all the options that would be a good fit in your case => Medical insurance calculator - Fab French Insurance
Also important to note, US & Canada are usually excluded but PHI (private health insurance) usually cover you pretty much anywhere apart from the US & Canada which are almost always excluded from the standard packages but EU + continental Europe + UK, middle East and Africa are covered
Thank you for your help and the link for the calculation. I’ll have a look later today. Much appreciated.
Best regards
Sue