Even if we never use our coverage abroad, at least it’s easy to buy and renew for our family of four
Instead of trudging through complicated family travel medical insurance options, we set up insurance for our world travels in 5 minutes. Whether a couple weeks abroad or a round-the-world gap year, there’s coverage you can rely on. Our policy auto-renews monthly for a year, and setup has been easy, even with kids. Without getting technical, let’s look at a great option for traveling families—even if your travels don’t have an end date.
Travel medical insurance when away from your home country
Your health insurance typically only covers you in your own country, not abroad. If you get really sick, your kid suffers a major injury, or a huge disruption derails your trip, expenses rack up quickly.
Finding family travel medical insurance can be complex and time-consuming, especially when you travel with kids like we do. That’s why we’re going to share the provider we’ve auto-renewed since starting our family world travels in 2022.

(And yes, we’re talking about emergency medical insurance when traveling abroad. Most medical insurance policies don’t cover you outside your own country. Full disclosure: We pay out of pocket for our SafetyWing Nomad insurance. Long after we became customers, we joined their affiliate program, so if you use our links, they support us at no additional cost to you.)
SafetyWing Nomad Insurance has been our choice since 2022
If you’ve been trying to figure out travel medical insurance and would like to find a simple solution for your family, have a look at SafetyWing’s options below.
For example, our family has been traveling full time since 2022, and we needed open-ended coverage. If there’s something that works for us, there’s something that can work for you too!
The coverage is comprehensive for various disruptions or emergencies, and SafetyWing provides price breaks and even free coverage for kids through age 10. The coverage comes in 2 main options, and you can explore each of them below:
SafetyWing offers 2 types of family travel medical insurance
Essential
Covers: Emergency medical and some emergency travel situations
Complete
Covers: Full emergency and routine medical, plus extra travel contingencies and home country coverage
If it helps, we currently use the Essential package. Here are a few reasons why:
- We maintain separate health insurance coverage in our home country
- Our family doesn’t have medical conditions that require ongoing care, so we don’t need the routine care options offered in Complete
- For specialized care needs (such as maintenance for Jodie’s prosthetic leg), we’d plan to return home rather than seek providers abroad

If you’d like to know more about SafetyWing and its advantages, let’s dive into that below.
What’s covered?
Here’s a quick overview of what each product covers:
Nomad Insurance Essential
- Designed for travelers and nomads who need emergency travel medical coverage abroad for unexpected illnesses and injuries
- Available worldwide with limited home country coverage (30 days every 90 days; 15 days if your home country is the U.S.)
- Covers doctor visits, hospital stays, emergency medical evacuation, travel delay, lost checked luggage, personal liability, emergency response, and natural disasters
- Buy anywhere: available for purchase in 180 countries and can be bought while already traveling
- Subscription-based: $56.28/4 weeks for ages 18–39. Auto-renews every 28 days until canceled. Costs vary by age and family size, but for example, for 2025–2026, our family of four’s monthly premium is $297.36 for 2 adults, a 10-year-old, and a 13-year-old
- Children included: 1 child under 10 per adult (up to 2 per family) included at no extra cost
- Group option: you can purchase on behalf of your travel group
More details, exclusions and pricing below:
Nomad Insurance Complete
- Fully-equipped health and travel coverage, built to serve as your primary global health insurance
- Includes everything in Nomad Insurance Essential plus coverage for preventative/routine care, mental health, complementary therapies, cancer treatment, dental add-on, and more
- Available in your country of residence and abroad so you’re covered wherever you live or travel
- Extra travel protections included on top of the Essential plan, such as trip cancellation, accommodation burglary, and delayed checked bags
More details, exclusions and pricing below:
What’s not covered?
Naturally, any insurance policy has exclusions and circumstances that are excluded from coverage. Understanding what’s not covered is just as important as knowing what’s covered, but even the exclusions are not necessarily cut and dry.

Under the Essentials plan, for example, SafetyWing lists 54 exclusions, including
- pre-existing illness or injury [and even this has some nuance]
- Any costs or medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth, except what is described in the section called “Complications of pregnancy”.
- Any charges incurred when the purpose of your travel is to obtain medical or cosmetic treatment.
You can find the full details on exclusions and more at Nomad Insurance Essential description of coverage.
And here are exclusions and more details for Nomad Insurance Complete.
Ready to start your coverage?
Family travel medical insurance gives us essential peace of mind
For our global travels with kids, we maintain ongoing Nomad Insurance Essential coverage through SafetyWing.
We haven’t used our coverage yet, but we never say never. Having this coverage brings huge peace of mind, especially when traveling with kids. Here are some reasons we consider it important to travel with family travel medical insurance:
- If we had a medical emergency, we could get those costs covered or reimbursed instead of being stuck spending out-of-pocket
- Medical evacuation coverage
- Trip interruption: If there’s a death in the family that we had to fly back for, we can get compensation
We didn’t have to wade through lots of forms, pricing, and quotes
We’ve tried other providers that require you to navigate multiple screens just to get a quote for multiple travelers. The process was so difficult, we couldn’t even figure out how to add our family of four.
In order to set up our SafetyWing coverage, we only needed to enter in some basic details for each person being covered (such as names, birthdays, and biological sex), along with at least one of the countries we’re traveling to. After entering our payment details, boom—we had coverage.

And we can do something else with the time we didn’t have to spend wading through insurance complexities.
This insurance didn’t require an end date
Whenever we’ve looked into other insurance options, we quickly got frustrated.
Many providers and quote forms require firm end dates. Our travels don’t have a firm end date.
SafetyWing Nomad Insurance is there for short or long trips abroad, but it doesn’t require an end date for you to set up your coverage. We like that we can choose our coverage and set it to auto-renew monthly for a year. If, for some reason, we needed to end our coverage earlier, we could log into our dashboard and end the policy.
That’s peace of mind—and one less task we have to tend to—for affordable coverage for our whole family.
Just a few days before writing this, we set up our new policy for 2025-2026. It took about 5 minutes.
Affordable family travel medical insurance that’s hassle-free to set up and manage
SafetyWing made it fast, easy, and convenient for us to set up the reliable travel medical insurance coverage we needed, for a price that fit our family budget.
I didn’t need to spend a week combing through policies. We had trips to plan and a world to explore.
There were even price breaks for the kids, making the policy more budget-friendly. Even as we go into our new policy, we now have to pay for both children, but the premium is still fair and affordable for the extensive coverage it provides.

There’s no one-size-fits-all for family travel medical insurance. Different families have different needs, such as medical conditions that require regular and/or ongoing care. I can’t speak to that, and that’s precisely where digging into fine print is essential. Policies out there can fit most situations.
For many families, figuring out travel medical insurance for you and your kids can be easier through a provider such as SafetyWing.
I wish insurance were simpler. Until then, our family has a SafetyWing policy in our backpack pocket whenever we’re abroad. The cost is reasonable, setup was hassle-free, and auto-renew removes a task from our to-do list.
And I love knowing that our SafetyWing Nomad travel medical insurance is just there in the background, quiet and at the ready, yet hopefully never needed.
Want to quickly and easily get real-world numbers and coverage for your family travels (not to mention your family budget)?



