The average trip now costs a record $7,250, and a large share of travelers are booking without coverage for the risks most likely to affect their trip, according to Squaremouth’s Q1 2026 Travel Insurance Trends Report, drawn from data on more than 4 million customers.
Key Points
- Average trip cost hit a record $7,250 in Squaremouth’s Q1 2026 data, its highest level on record.
- 34% of travelers purchased policies without cancellation coverage, leaving a meaningful share of the record trip cost unprotected if plans fall through.
- 88% of travelers heading on adventure trips and 95% of those heading to the Middle East bought policies, well above the marketplace’s overall average.
- Cancel-for-any-reason (CFAR) coverage searches rose notably, reflecting growing traveler interest in more flexible protection.
Squaremouth, a marketplace that compares travel insurance policies across providers, draws its data directly from actual customer purchases and searches rather than a survey, giving the figures a level of real-world grounding that broader travel surveys sometimes lack.
The gap between record trip costs and incomplete coverage is where the real risk sits for travelers. A trip costing over $7,000 that isn’t covered for cancellation exposes a traveler to losing that full amount if an illness, family emergency, or other covered event forces a last-minute change of plans — a risk that scales directly with how much a trip actually costs.
The elevated purchase rates among adventure travelers and Middle East-bound travelers point to how risk perception, not just trip cost, shapes coverage decisions: travelers heading somewhere they perceive as higher-risk are far more likely to buy protection than those on a standard domestic or resort trip, even when the dollar amount at stake is similar.
That gap matters most for the kind of trip that feels the least risky going in: a domestic long weekend or a familiar resort vacation, where travelers are statistically least likely to buy any coverage at all, even though weather delays, sudden illness, and family emergencies don’t discriminate by destination. Squaremouth’s own comparison tools let travelers weigh basic cancellation coverage against more comprehensive cancel-for-any-reason policies, which typically cost more but reimburse a larger share of a trip’s cost for reasons a standard policy wouldn’t cover.
The rising average trip cost itself is part of what’s pushing more travelers to at least shop for coverage even if they don’t ultimately buy it, according to Squaremouth’s own data on search behavior. As the dollar amount at risk climbs, the math on a policy that typically costs a small percentage of the total trip increasingly favors buying it, even for travelers who’ve historically skipped insurance on the assumption that nothing would go wrong.
