How wildfires and heatwaves affect your travel insurance

As wildfires blazed on the Cap Ferret peninsula in south-west France in July, some people left by boat. The roads out run through dense pine plantation, the fire had reached them, and the gendarmerie put those without cars onto ferries.

Around 44,000 people fled Cap Ferret, a stretch of oyster villages and holiday homes an hour from Bordeaux. Bordeaux airport was shut. Across France, about 250,000 were moved. Meanwhile, Spain declared a national emergency over wildfires in Madrid and Ávila.

Neither country is somewhere the Foreign Office tells you not to go. Its advice for France and Spain is to follow local instructions and speak to your accommodation provider.

So if you fly this month, the trip is on. But even if you are insured, you can still lose the money. What decides that is mostly a decision you made when you booked.

Catastrophe as an extra

Wildfires divide travel insurance protection into two parts. Emergency medical treatment for smoke inhalation or heat-related illness is generally covered under standard travel insurance. Possessions lost or necessarily abandoned during an evacuation are also likely to be covered, subject to policy limits and exclusions. However, cancellation, an early return or alternative accommodation may not be covered unless the policy includes catastrophe or natural disaster cover.

Figures published by GoCompare put that at 50% of single-trip and 52% of annual policies . Read it the other way, and nearly half the market sells none at all. Where it exists it is usually capped, so a £600 hotel bill against a £500 limit still leaves you paying.

The headline numbers hide this. Most policies will cover cancellation of £3,000 or more , which is the figure people compare on, but that ceiling only pays out for a reason the policy recognises. Excess works the same way. Well over half of annual policies apply it per person, per section , so a family of four claiming for cancellation and accommodation pays it eight times over.

Then there is the trigger. The Association of British Insurers frames this around policies that include disruption or natural disaster cover, but each insurer writes its own switch. Some pay only once your accommodation is unusable. Others want an evacuation order or a change in Foreign Office advice. Smoke, shut beaches and cancelled boat trips clear none of those bars.

The definition is a loophole in itself. Policies describe a natural catastrophe as something unforeseen and unavoidable , wording built for one-off shocks. A fire season that arrives every summer, in the same regions, forecast weeks ahead, sits awkwardly in a definition designed around surprise.

A couple brought this issue to the Financial Ombudsman Service this year. Heat, nearby fires and wind had closed their hotel’s outdoor facilities and excursions. The insurance company denied their claim, and the ombudsman upheld that decision. They lost, because they had not cancelled, their room still worked, and nothing they had paid for was unrecoverable.

Timing matters too. Insurance covers the unknown, so once a fire is in the news your insurer can treat it as a known event and exclude anything connected to it. Buy your cover the moment you book, even if that is months before you fly, because a policy bought after the fires start will not cover them.

Extraordinary circumstances

If an airline or hotel cancels, go to them first. Insurers pay for what you cannot recover elsewhere, so a refund you were entitled to and did not pursue becomes a cost you have to meet yourself.

The stronger protection sits outside insurance entirely. Under regulation 12 of the Package Travel Regulations , a package can be cancelled fee-free when extraordinary circumstances at the destination significantly affect it, and the organiser must refund you in full. Book the flight and the villa separately and that right disappears. Paying by credit card can also provide Section 75 protection for bookings costing more than £100 and up to £30,000. This may allow you to claim from the card provider if the airline, hotel or holiday company fails to provide what you paid for, although it will not normally cover a voluntary decision not to travel.

Before cancelling anything, ask the operator to move your dates or your resort. And check fire risk by region, not country. Madrid burning tells you nothing about Menorca.

Scientists have attributed the conditions behind these fires to climate change , so this is a recurring risk rather than a freak summer. Insurers have responded by tightening what their policies cover. Many travellers, however, still choose insurance mainly on price, encouraging providers to compete by limiting protection. The risk is therefore increasingly shifted back to travellers through exclusions in the policy wording, which few people read until they need to claim.