Best travel insurance in Ireland 2026: 11 policies scored and ranked, from €18.65 a week

Go Protect is the best travel insurance in Ireland in 2026, with 85 out of 100 in our latest audit of the eleven policies an Irish resident can actually buy. It costs €29.61 for a week in Spain, bills the hospital directly and refunds up to €12,000 if you cancel.

That verdict comes from a measurement, not an impression. On 15 October 2026 we priced all eleven plans on sale to someone living in Ireland for the identical trip, one traveller aged 34 going to Spain for seven days, then read each policy wording and scored every plan out of 100 across five weighted areas: emergency medical care, cancellation and curtailment, baggage and delay, assistance and rescue, and value for money at the price quoted.

No policy wins for everyone, which is why this page ranks them rather than just listing them. The cheapest plan on the Irish shelf, WorldSecure Basic at €18.65, carries no cancellation cover at all and will not quote anybody over 39. Five of the eleven plans refuse a 68-year-old outright. A week in Spain and a month in Thailand are separated by far less money than two plans on the same trip, so the plan you pick matters more than where you are going.

Prices, scores and policy wordings on this page were checked in November 2026. Every figure below is a real quote or a real contractual limit, never an estimate.

Go Protect leads our Irish ranking with 85 out of 100, ahead of Safe Start on 79 and WorldSecure Platinum on 72. The table below is the scored shortlist: five plans out of the eleven we priced, with the score, the real quote for our reference trip and the kind of traveller each one actually suits.

The five weights are fixed before the plans are read, so no policy can be scored generously after the fact:

• Emergency medical and hospital care, 25 points. The ceiling for treatment abroad, plus whether the insurer pays the hospital directly and whether treatment continues once you are home.
• Cancellation and curtailment, 25 points. How much of a cancelled holiday comes back, and how much of a trip cut short.
• Baggage, belongings and delay, 15 points. The baggage ceiling, any separate electronics limit and compensation for a delayed departure.
• Assistance, search and rescue, 15 points. Search and rescue costs, sea evacuation, the emergency cash advance and legal cover abroad.
• Value for money, 20 points. The cover actually bought per euro of premium, measured on the quote above.

Go Protect wins because it is the only plan that scores full marks on assistance while still being among the cheapest: €10,000 of search and rescue, €10,000 of sea evacuation, a €2,300 emergency cash advance and €8,000 of legal cover abroad, none of which the cheaper WorldSecure Basic carries. Safe Start buys a higher medical tier and the highest curtailment cover, at roughly half again the price.

Recommended for youA. Fruchard · Co-Founder & Travel Insurance Expert

Our number one: Go Protect

You get emergency hospital treatment abroad with nothing to pay up front, and your holiday refunded if you have to cancel for a reason the policy covers. Go Protect does that better per euro than anything else on the Irish shelf, which is why it tops our ranking at 85 out of 100.

Behind the score sit €300,000 of emergency medical cover in Europe, rising to €500,000 outside it, with the hospital billed directly rather than you paying and claiming back. Cancellation reaches €12,000, the joint-highest of the eleven plans we priced for Ireland. It adds €10,000 for search and rescue, €10,000 for sea evacuation, a €2,300 emergency cash advance and €8,000 of legal cover, and it still quotes at 99 years old when six of the eleven plans stop at 69 or younger.

It is the cheapest complete policy of our shortlist, not the cheapest policy outright: WorldSecure Basic costs less and carries no cancellation cover whatsoever. If a €500,000 medical ceiling in Europe matters more to you than price, Safe Start and SafeTrip Tourism both reach it. The cards below show today’s price for your own dates.

Go ProtectUnderwritten by Mutuaide

From€28.82

Included coverage

Emergency medical expenses€300,000

Direct billingIncluded

Emergency medical evacuation & repatriationCovered in full

24/7 worldwide assistanceUnlimited

See all 23 benefitsGet a quote

Personalized quote · no obligation

WorldSecure PlatinumUnderwritten by MGEN

From€28.88

Included coverage

Emergency medical expenses€300,000

Direct billingIncluded

Emergency medical evacuation & repatriationCovered in full

24/7 worldwide assistanceUnlimited

See all 23 benefitsGet a quote

Personalized quote · no obligation

Safe StartUnderwritten by Mutuaide

From€44.00

Included coverage

Emergency medical expenses€500,000

Direct billingIncluded

Emergency medical evacuation & repatriationCovered in full

24/7 worldwide assistanceUnlimited

See all 23 benefitsGet a quote

Personalized quote · no obligation

Price for 1 traveller aged 34, 7 days in Spain, departing Ireland. Prices in euro, calculated by HelloSafe, August 2026. Your own price depends on your age, the length of the trip and the destination.

The best travel insurance costs from €18.65 for one person on a seven-day trip to Spain, €120.41 for a family of four over ten days and €88.59 for a couple spending a fortnight in the United States. The table gives the cheapest plan, the middle of the market and the plan we would pick for each kind of traveller, all quoted on the same day.

Two things stand out once the quotes sit side by side. The gap between plans is far wider than the gap between destinations: thirty days in Thailand costs €44.07 on the cheapest plan, while a single week in Spain costs €198.88 on the dearest. And age moves the market more than anything else. At 34 all eleven plans compete for your business; at 68 only six will take you, and the cheapest of those is still our top-ranked plan.

The right plan follows the trip, not the brand. A city break needs a medical ceiling and little else; a ski week needs off-piste cover; a month in Asia needs a long-stay limit that does not expire mid-trip. Here is where each kind of Irish traveller lands.

Six checks decide whether a policy is worth buying, and only the first is about price. Run them in this order on any quote, including the ones in our ranking.

• ✓
  A medical ceiling of at least €300,000: Every plan on the Irish shelf clears this in Europe. Outside Europe aim for €500,000: Safe Start, SafeTrip Tourism and Go Explore + hold it, and Go Protect lifts to it automatically once you leave the continent.
• ✓
  The hospital billed directly, not you: All eleven plans we priced include direct billing, so you never advance a hospital bill. Verify it on anything you buy elsewhere, because paying up front and claiming back is the single most expensive difference between two policies that look alike.
• ✓
  Cancellation cover, and a ceiling that matches the holiday: Go Protect, Safe Start and SafeTrip Tourism all reach €12,000, WorldSecure Platinum €9,000, World Travel only €1,500. WorldSecure Basic, Safe Care, Go Explore, Go Explore +, Safe Nomad and Safe Extreme carry none at all.
• ✓
  Curtailment, for the trip cut short: Cancellation pays if you never leave. Curtailment pays if you come home early, and it is far rarer: Safe Start reaches €12,000, SafeTrip Tourism €6,000, Go Protect €2,500, and the other eight plans nothing.
• ✓
  An age limit above your age: This is the check people skip. WorldSecure Basic stops at 39, WorldSecure Platinum at 65, Safe Start at 69. Go Protect quotes to 99 and SafeTrip Tourism to 98.
• ✓
  Search, rescue and getting home: Repatriation is paid at actual cost on all eleven plans, but search and rescue is not: €10,000 on Go Protect, €6,000 on Go Explore +, €3,000 on WorldSecure Basic. Only Go Protect adds €10,000 of sea evacuation.

Six of the eleven plans will quote a 68-year-old leaving Ireland, and the cheapest of them is €33.45 for a fortnight in Portugal. Age is the hardest filter in this market: it removes plans entirely rather than merely raising the price.

The practical consequence is that a 68-year-old and a 34-year-old should not shop the same way. At 68 the ranking collapses to six plans, Go Protect is both the cheapest and the highest scoring, and the usual advice to simply take the cheapest quote would hand you a policy that costs nearly three times as much. Our senior travel insurance comparison for Ireland prices the same plans at 70, 80 and beyond.

The clauses that cost people money are not the headline ceilings, they are the conditions attached to them. These six are read directly from the policy wordings of the plans in our ranking.

• ✕
  A medical excess you pay on every claim: Go Protect applies a €30 excess per medical claim. Dental emergencies escape it but are capped at €300, which is one filling, not a crown.
• ✕
  The medical ceiling changes with the zone: Go Protect pays €300,000 in Europe, mainland France and Mediterranean countries, and €500,000 in the rest of the world. The number on the card is not one number.
• ✕
  Your own country is never covered: Go Protect excludes the country you live in, along with Russia, Ukraine and North Korea. A policy bought in Ireland does not cover treatment in Ireland.
• ✕
  Cancellation has a 48-hour window: Go Protect's cancellation cover must be taken out within 48 hours of booking the trip, or failing that up to 20 days before departure. Buy it later and the cover is simply not available.
• ✕
  A five-day waiting period close to departure: Buy Go Protect less than 30 days before you travel and the cancellation cover does not start for five days. Anything that goes wrong in those five days is not covered.
• ✕
  Risk sports are an option, not a given: Go Protect's standard cover does not include off-piste skiing, scuba diving, paragliding or canyoning. Its risk-sports extension names them, and scuba to 80 metres, but you have to buy it.

No. The European Health Insurance Card gives an Irish resident medically necessary state-provided treatment in the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, on the same terms and at the same cost as a local resident. The European Commission states plainly that it is not an alternative to travel insurance and does not guarantee free treatment.

Three gaps matter on a real trip. The card does not pay for private healthcare, so a private clinic in Spain bills you in full. It does not pay repatriation costs, including the flight home, which every one of the eleven plans we priced covers at actual cost. And where a local resident pays a share of the bill, so do you: the card equalises you with locals, it does not exempt you.

The card and a policy are complements, not substitutes. Carry the card for public treatment in Europe and hold a policy for the repatriation, the cancellation, the baggage and the private care the card never touches. Our guide to the EHIC card in Ireland covers how to apply, how long the HSE takes to refund and exactly what you still pay.

Outside Europe, €500,000 of emergency medical cover is the level to aim for, and the cheapest way to reach it from Ireland is €88.59 for two people over a fortnight. European trips are the easy case: the public system is there, the EHIC works and every plan clears €300,000.

Go Protect handles this with a zone rule rather than a single number: €300,000 across Europe and the Mediterranean, €500,000 everywhere else, so the cover rises exactly where the bills do. Safe Start, SafeTrip Tourism and Go Explore + hold €500,000 in every zone, and Safe Nomad pays treatment at actual cost with no stated ceiling at all. Our travel insurance comparison for the USA prices all of them for an American trip, and the worldwide cover comparison shows what changes when the United States is added or excluded.

An annual multi-trip policy starts at €621.50 a year for an Irish resident, so it pays for itself at roughly eleven weeks of travel a year against the same plan bought trip by trip. Four of the eleven plans sell an annual version: Go Explore at €621.50, Safe Extreme at €744.67, Go Explore + at €890.44 and Safe Nomad at €949.20.

Do the arithmetic before you sign rather than trusting the usual rule of thumb. Three one-week European trips on Go Protect come to about €89, nowhere near the annual premium. The annual policy wins on frequency and on convenience, not on price for two or three holidays, and it removes the 48-hour cancellation window from every future booking. Our annual travel insurance comparison for Ireland sets the real break-even against your own travel pattern.

Rarely, and never for the expensive things. Card-included travel cover is built around the trip you paid for with that card, and it is the structure rather than the brand that falls short: low medical ceilings, a short list of cancellation reasons, strict trip-length limits, and in most cases no direct billing, so you advance the hospital bill and claim it back.

Set that against what the eleven plans on our Irish ranking actually hold: €300,000 to €500,000 of emergency medical cover with the hospital paid directly, repatriation at actual cost, and cancellation to €12,000 on the three strongest plans. Those are the three lines a card most often cannot match, and they are the three that turn a bad week abroad into a manageable one.

Read your card's own benefit schedule for the ceiling, the covered cancellation reasons, the maximum trip length and whether the insurer pays the hospital or reimburses you. Where it stops short, the gap is what a policy is for, and our guide to what travel insurance covers sets out each guarantee in full so you can compare the two line by line.

Buying early does not change the price, but it is the difference between having cancellation cover and not having it. The premium is set by your age, your dates and your destination, not by how far ahead you book.

The cover is a different matter. Go Protect's cancellation guarantee has to be bought within 48 hours of booking the trip, or failing that at least 20 days before departure, and inside 30 days of travel it carries a five-day waiting period. When we re-priced the same week in Spain with cancellation cover on a €2,500 holiday, only three of the eleven plans would quote at all, from €81.36. Leave it late and the market shrinks to nothing.

The practical rule is short: buy the policy the day you book the holiday. Medical, repatriation and baggage cover work whenever you buy them, so a late purchase still protects the trip itself. It is only cancellation, the guarantee that depends on nothing having gone wrong yet, that you cannot buy back. If you want to price your own dates against the full shelf, our travel insurance comparison for Ireland quotes every plan in under a minute.

• Which travel insurance is the best in Ireland?

  Go Protect, with 85 out of 100 in our October 2026 audit of the eleven plans on sale to Irish residents. It costs €29.61 for a week in Spain, holds €300,000 of emergency medical cover in Europe and €500,000 elsewhere, bills hospitals directly, refunds up to €12,000 if you cancel and quotes up to 99 years of age.

• What is the cheapest travel insurance for an Irish resident?

  WorldSecure Basic, at €18.65 for one traveller aged 34 spending seven days in Spain. It covers €300,000 of emergency treatment with direct billing, but it carries no cancellation cover, no curtailment cover and no upper age above 39, which is why it scores 48 out of 100 rather than winning.

• Is the cheapest policy good enough for a week in Europe?

  For a short European break where you would absorb the cost of cancelling, yes: €18.65 buys €300,000 of emergency medical cover with the hospital billed directly. If losing the holiday would hurt, the €11 step up to Go Protect adds cancellation cover to €12,000, and that is the gap the cheapest plan leaves open.

• How much should travel insurance cost from Ireland?

  Between €18.65 and €198.88 for one person on a seven-day European trip, with the middle of the market at €55.37. A family of four over ten days starts at €120.41 and a couple spending a fortnight in the United States at €88.59. Anything above the median should be buying you a higher medical tier or cancellation cover.

• Which travel insurance covers over-70s in Ireland?

  Go Protect quotes to 99 and SafeTrip Tourism to 98, and they are the only two of our shortlist that do. Safe Start stops at 69, WorldSecure Platinum at 65 and WorldSecure Basic at 39. At 68 only six of the eleven plans will quote at all, from €33.45 for a fortnight in Portugal.

• Do I need €500,000 of medical cover or is €300,000 enough?

  €300,000 is enough inside Europe, where the public system and the European Health Insurance Card carry most of the load. Outside Europe, and especially in the United States, aim for €500,000. Go Protect moves between the two automatically by zone, so one policy covers both cases.

• How is the HelloSafe score calculated?

  Each plan is scored out of 100 on five weighted areas: emergency medical and hospital care (25 points), cancellation and curtailment (25), baggage, belongings and delay (15), assistance, search and rescue (15) and value for money at the quoted price (20). The weights are fixed before the policy wordings are read, and no insurer can pay to change a score.

• Does my European Health Insurance Card mean I can skip insurance?

  No. The card covers medically necessary state-provided treatment in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom at the same cost as a local resident. It does not pay for private care, does not pay to fly you home, and the European Commission states it is not an alternative to travel insurance.

• When should I buy my policy?

  The day you book the trip. Go Protect’s cancellation cover must be taken out within 48 hours of booking, or at least 20 days before departure, and inside 30 days of travel it carries a five-day waiting period. Medical and baggage cover work whenever you buy, but cancellation cover cannot be bought back later.

• Is an annual policy cheaper than buying cover each trip?

  Only if you travel a lot. Annual multi-trip cover starts at €621.50 a year, which works out at about eleven weeks of travel a year against the same plan bought trip by trip. Three one-week European trips on Go Protect cost about €89, so for two or three holidays a year single-trip cover stays well ahead.

• Does travel insurance bought in Ireland cover me in Ireland?

  No. Go Protect, like the other plans we priced, excludes the country you live in, along with Russia, Ukraine and North Korea. Cover starts when you leave Ireland, which is why a staycation needs no policy and a trip to Belfast needs you to read the territorial clause.

• Are extreme sports covered as standard?

  No. Off-piste skiing, scuba diving, paragliding and canyoning sit outside the standard cover on every plan we read. Go Protect sells a risk-sports extension that names them, including scuba to 80 metres, and Safe Extreme is built around them at €198.88 for a week. Ticking the sports option in the comparison is what declares them.