Find the right travel insurance for a Family Summer Holiday to France

Family policies cover everyone on a single contract. Some include children at no extra cost, others charge a reduced premium per child. What matters more for a family of four is whether children share the adults' limits or have their own, and whether they get personal-accident cover at all. Many policies give children little or no personal-accident payout, and some share a single liability or baggage limit across the whole family.

This pays for emergency treatment abroad and getting you home. France has excellent hospitals and a reciprocal health agreement, so a free GHIC card often makes treatment free or reduced. £5m is ample for France, so the real differentiator is the excess: many policies waive the medical excess when you treat under a GHIC, but some do not, and a few offer no GHIC waiver at all. Air-ambulance repatriation is rarely needed from France but is covered up to the medical limit.

Cancellation and curtailment cover pays non-refundable costs if you have to cancel or cut the trip short. For a family of four with flights, a 14-night stay and excursions in peak season, the total can run past £5,000. Limits range widely, from around £500 to £8,000 per person, and the reasons covered vary too: some pay only for a short list of named events, while others also include FCDO advice changes and supplier failure. Lower tiers can fall well short of the booking value.

Catastrophe cover pays for alternative accommodation, or to come home, if a wildfire, storm or flood makes your resort unusable. Coastal and southern France sees wildfires and heatwaves in July and August, so this is a genuine risk on this trip. Policies treat it very differently: some include it as standard, some only as a paid add-on, and several do not cover it at all, which is a notable gap for a summer coastal holiday.

France is prone to air-traffic-control and transport strikes in summer, which delay or cancel flights. Cover here means a delay benefit (small cash sums per period delayed), missed-departure cover and the ability to abandon and claim after a long delay. Thresholds vary a lot: delay benefits range from token sums of around £20 to £25 per 12 hours up to payouts that start at 6 hours, and some tiers carry no delay or abandonment cover at all without a paid upgrade. Strikes already public when you book are normally excluded.

The excess is what you pay towards each claim. The catch for a family is how it is applied: many policies charge it per person and per section, so a single incident affecting all four travellers can trigger four or more excesses. Some policies cap the number of excesses per trip or per incident; others do not. Excess levels typically run from around £35 to £195, and a GHIC can reduce the medical excess to nil on many policies.

Baggage cover has an overall limit plus a single-article sub-limit, and a separate, usually lower, cap for valuables. On a beach holiday the family carries phones, a camera and maybe a tablet, items that often exceed the single-item limit. Single-article limits typically fall between £150 and £500, valuables caps can be as low as £150 to £200 in total, phones are sometimes capped at £100, and gadgets are occasionally only covered as a paid add-on. Items left unattended on the beach are a standard exclusion.

Personal liability covers you if a member of the family injures someone or damages property, a realistic risk with young children around a pool or resort. Limits typically run from £1m to £3m, but the detail matters: some policies apply a single limit shared across the whole family rather than per person, and a few exclude claims where one family member injures another, so a child hurting a sibling would not be covered.