Something shifted in how Americans buy travel insurance this year, and it has almost nothing to do with getting sick abroad. Cancel For Any Reason coverage — the add-on that lets you back out of a trip for literally any reason, including “I just don’t feel like going anymore,” and still recover a chunk of what you paid — nearly doubled in adoption between last summer and this one. That’s not a slow drift. That’s travelers collectively deciding the standard policy isn’t enough anymore, and the reason traces straight back to what a trip costs them if it falls apart.
According to travel insurance marketplace Squaremouth’s Summer 2026 Travel Trends report, released May 29, 2026, 13.5% of travelers who bought a policy through the site added CFAR coverage this summer, up from 6.9% last summer. That’s the adoption rate essentially doubling in a single year, and the report notes the increase held across the board — “the top 20 summer destinations are all seeing a CFAR increase,” per Squaremouth, meaning this isn’t a quirk tied to one nervous market or one unstable region.
Why “Any Reason” Beat Medical Coverage as the Selling Point
Standard trip cancellation coverage already protects you against the classic disasters — you break a leg, a parent dies, your airline goes bankrupt. CFAR exists for everything that policy doesn’t cover: your work schedule changes, a relationship ends, you simply lose your nerve about a destination after watching the news, or a better trip comes up and you’d rather eat a partial loss than a total one. It typically costs 40% to 60% more than a standard policy and only reimburses 50% to 75% of prepaid, non-refundable costs — worse terms, by design, than the coverage it’s layered onto. Travelers are paying more for less certainty of payout, and choosing to anyway.
That only makes sense once you look at what’s actually at stake per trip. Squaremouth’s data shows the average insured trip cost jumped from $7,794 in 2025 to $9,668 in 2026 — a 24% year-over-year increase. Some destinations moved even harder: insured trip costs to Norway went from $11,179 to $14,950, a 34% spike, and South Africa and Tanzania both cracked the $23,000-$24,000 range this year. When a single trip represents nearly $10,000 in nonrefundable spending on average, a rigid cancellation policy stops feeling like a minor inconvenience and starts feeling like real financial exposure.
Travelers Are Also Buying Insurance Sooner
The same report found the average gap between putting down a trip deposit and buying insurance shrank from 71 days in 2025 to 62 days in 2026. That’s a small number with a real implication: CFAR coverage almost always has to be purchased within a short window of the initial trip deposit — 14 to 21 days, depending on the plan and provider — or it’s off the table entirely. Travelers moving faster to insure suggests more of them are shopping for CFAR specifically and know they’ll lose eligibility if they wait, and it’s not a small miss: separate first-quarter 2026 data cited in that same coverage found that “roughly one in three” travelers who searched for CFAR after a disruption was already in the news had missed their purchase window entirely, with search interest in the coverage jumping nearly 30% during a single geopolitical flare-up earlier this year.
The destinations travelers are protecting this hardest track closely with where the money’s actually going. Squaremouth’s top 10 insured destinations for June-July 2026 were the United States, Italy, Canada, France, Spain, Mexico, Greece, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom, and Japan — a mix of high-cost, high-commitment trips (Italy, Japan, Greece) alongside domestic and short-haul travel where a canceled trip still stings even at a lower price point.
What This Means If You’re Booking a Trip Right Now
If your fall or winter trip involves a deposit north of a few thousand dollars, the CFAR math is worth running before you assume it’s an unnecessary upsell. Because eligibility windows close fast, the decision point isn’t “do I want this coverage” in the abstract — it’s “do I want to preserve the option,” which is a much cheaper question to answer within the first two weeks of booking than it is to regret later. The pattern in Squaremouth’s numbers isn’t that Americans got more anxious travelers this year. It’s that trip costs climbed fast enough to make flexibility itself feel like the thing worth insuring, separate from whatever might actually go wrong.
