SoNomad review: a $5,000,000 Canadian medical plan, and the price our card cannot show you

SoNomad is not an insurance company. It is a Montreal insurance-of-persons firm that distributes travel insurance, and the policy behind this offer is issued and underwritten by Europ Assistance S.A. Canada Branch: up to $5,000,000 of emergency medical coverage, trip cancellation up to $40,000, baggage up to $2,000, and no upper age limit on the single-trip medical plan. Every figure on this page is in Canadian dollars, because the policy states that all benefit limits and premiums are in Canadian funds.

The medical ceiling is the headline and it is a real one. Five million dollars sits at the top of the Canadian market, and the assistance centre pays the hospital directly instead of asking you to advance the money. For a Canadian whose main fear is a six-figure bill in Buffalo or Fort Lauderdale, that is the argument, and it is a good one.

What you give up is breadth. There is no personal liability coverage in this contract at all, so if you injure someone or damage a rental apartment the policy is silent. There is no search and rescue benefit and no ski package, although repatriation itself is covered, and our guide to repatriation insurance explains what that involves. And the pre-existing condition clause, the clause that decides most Canadian claims, gives a traveller over 60 two different stability windows depending on which paragraph you read. We publish both readings below rather than pick the convenient one.

The other thing to settle before you start: this page cannot show you a price. The figure our comparator prints on the SoNomad card is a stored floor, not a quote, and it does not move when you change your age, your destination or the length of your trip. We measured that across 24 live scenarios on 8 September 2026 and it never changed once. The real number comes from SoNomad's own form, which is where our funnel sends you.

SoNomad was founded in Montreal in 2019 by Mathieu Laplante and Eve Murphy, and it describes itself on its own site as an insurance-of-persons firm, which in Quebec is the regulated category for a distribution firm rather than an insurer. It is a member of the Travel Health Insurance Association of Canada, whose listing shows it selling in ten provinces and none of the territories. It publishes a formal complaint-handling policy from an address on Queen Street in Montreal. As with any policy sold through a distribution firm, the risk itself sits with an insurer, and for this offer the policy names that insurer on its very first page.

The policy sold through SoNomad under this offer is issued and underwritten by Europ Assistance S.A. Canada Branch, which is also the provider of all assistance and claims administration services under it (Introduction, page 4). That entity is real and it is federally regulated: the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions lists Europ Assistance S.A. as a foreign property and casualty insurance company operating in Canada through a branch, with a chief agent in Toronto and accident and sickness among its authorized classes, which is the class travel medical falls under. It applied to insure risks in Canada under section 574 of the Insurance Companies Act in early 2022 and opened its Canadian operation in August 2024. Its ultimate parent is the Italian group Assicurazioni Generali.

In practice the two roles split cleanly. SoNomad is the name on the offer: it receives your quote request, follows up with you and sells you the policy. Europ Assistance S.A. Canada Branch is the insurer: it issues the contract, runs the assistance centre you call before treatment, and handles and pays your claims. The policy you receive is made up of the terms and conditions, your Confirmation of Insurance and, if you had to complete one, your medical questionnaire (Definitions, page 10). Keep the confirmation with you when you travel.

The policy is governed by the law of the province or territory where the claim was incurred, and any dispute goes to that province's courts (General Terms, page 16). Quebec and New Brunswick residents will find a clause on page 17 recording that a French version was made available and that the English version was requested instead. If you want the French wording, ask for it before you pay.

This is second payer coverage, and the contract puts it in those terms on its own page 15: "This is second payor coverage". It pays only the portion of your eligible expenses that exceeds what your provincial or territorial plan, your employer group plan or any other in-force coverage pays first, and total benefits from every insurer combined cannot exceed what you actually spent.

Sitting underneath that is a Canadian reality worth stating plainly. Your provincial plan pays very little abroad. Ontario reimburses emergency out-of-country care at up to $50 a day for outpatient treatment, $200 a day for most inpatient care and $400 a day for high-acuity inpatient care such as an intensive care unit, and nothing at all towards getting you home. British Columbia pays $75 a day toward emergency inpatient hospital care, and the province's own guidance sets that against average American hospital costs that often exceed a thousand dollars a day and can reach ten thousand a day in intensive care. Quebec reimburses roughly $100 a day for hospitalization outside Canada and $50 a day for outpatient hospital care. The federal travel service is blunter still: your plan may cover none, or only a small part, of your medical care abroad, and the Government of Canada will not pay your medical bills.

So the policy's job is the gap between a few tens of dollars a day and the real invoice. That is worth understanding because of what the contract does with your provincial coverage.

Two conditions that turn on your provincial plan

The first is that you must already be covered. Eligibility requires that you and everyone on the policy are Canadian residents insured under a provincial or territorial government health insurance plan for the entire coverage period (Introduction, page 4). That is not paperwork, it is a condition of the contract.

The second is what happens if that coverage lapses mid-trip. Medical exclusion c)2 caps the insurer's total payment at $25,000 if you do not hold valid government health plan coverage for the whole duration of your trip. The $5,000,000 headline and the $25,000 floor live in the same policy: which one applies depends entirely on your provincial plan still being in force on the day you are treated.

How long you can be away before your province drops you

The contract puts this back on you in as many words: your government health insurance plan may limit how long you can be out of your province or territory and still qualify, and it is your responsibility to stay eligible for the whole coverage period (Introduction, page 5). Provinces set that allowance themselves and they do not agree with one another.

Yes for the medical coverage, and the operative clause is unusually clear even though the contract's own dictionary says otherwise. Emergency medical insurance begins when you leave your province or territory of residence and ends when you return to it or when your policy expires, whichever comes first (Emergency Medical, page 30). A Montrealer treated in Calgary is inside the coverage period.

The definitions page disagrees. It defines abroad as anywhere outside your province or territory of residence, your home country, and the sanctioned countries specified below (Definitions, page 8). Read literally, a trip that never leaves Canada is not abroad, and several benefits are written as payable for expenses incurred abroad. The operative clause and the definition point in opposite directions. The safe reading, and the one the multi-trip section confirms, is that leaving your province is what starts the coverage.

The multi-trip plans settle it in practice by treating Canadian travel as its own case: a trip entirely inside Canada but outside your province gets 60 days of coverage instead of the 4, 8, 15 or 30 days a foreign trip gets on the same plan (General Terms, page 16). Nobody writes that clause if domestic travel is uncovered.

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  Leaving your province starts the coverage: Not leaving Canada. The emergency medical clause names the province, not the country.
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  Returning to your province ends it: Even mid-trip. Come home for a weekend and the clock stops, then restarts when you leave again.
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  A domestic trip on a multi-trip plan gets 60 days: Against 4, 8, 15 or 30 days for a trip that leaves the country, on the same policy.
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  Baggage delay inside your province is never covered: Replacement purchases count only when made outside your province or territory (Baggage exclusions, page 37).

One loose end nobody has tidied: the definition of abroad promises a list of sanctioned countries specified below, and no such list appears anywhere near it. The list does exist, filed four pages later under the definition of travel advisory. We come back to it, because it is the most consequential list in the document.

This is the clause that decides most Canadian travel claims, and on this wording a traveller over 60 has to read it twice. A pre-existing condition is any medical condition that exists before you bought the policy (Definitions, page 11), and the exclusion turns on whether it stayed stable for a set number of days beforehand. The number depends on your age and on your plan.

The intended reading is almost certainly that 120 days belongs to the multi-trip and single-trip medical plans and 365 days to everything else. The trouble is that the 365-day paragraph is headed "All Applicable Plans", which on its face includes the two plans the 120-day paragraph has just named. A 65-year-old buying a multi-trip plan is inside both descriptions at once, and the contract offers nothing to break the tie.

The same pair of paragraphs is reproduced in the trip cancellation exclusions on pages 21 and 22, with one meaningful difference: for cancellation the window is counted back from the purchase date, and for medical it is counted back from the departure date. Buy late and the two windows cover different stretches of your medical history.

Our position, and you are free to disagree with it, is to plan on the 365-day reading if you are over 60. It is the longer of the two and it is the one an insurer can point to. Nearly half the people who quoted this policy through us fall in that bracket, which is the same population our guide to travel insurance for senior citizens is written for: of the 106 travellers named across 61 quote sessions between April and September 2026, 49 were 60 or older and 13 were between 75 and 84.

What "stable" actually means here

Stable is defined, and the definition is demanding. All seven of the following must hold across the whole window (Definitions, pages 11 and 12).

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  No new treatment prescribed or recommended: And no change to an existing treatment, including stopping one.
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  No change to any prescribed drug: An increase, a decrease, a stoppage or a new prescription all break stability. A change of dose counts.
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  The condition has not worsened: As determined by a physician or other registered medical practitioner.
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  No new, more frequent or more severe symptoms: Symptoms alone are enough, with or without a diagnosis.
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  No hospital admission and no referral to a specialist: The referral counts even if the appointment has not happened yet.
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  No tests, investigation or treatment recommended and not yet complete: And no test results still outstanding.
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  No planned or pending treatment: Anything already booked for after your return breaks the window.

A single dose adjustment to a blood pressure medication three months before departure is enough to put a 62-year-old outside the window on any of the readings. That is not unusual for the Canadian market, and our guide to travel insurance with a pre-existing condition sets out how other insurers word the same test, but it is stricter than most travellers assume, and it is why applicants aged 60 and over on the multi-trip and single-trip medical plans, and 75 and over on the single-trip comprehensive plan, are asked to complete a medical questionnaire that sets their premium (Introduction, page 4). Answer it inaccurately and the policy is voidable with no claim paid.

Our comparator shows one card. The contract behind it holds a family of plans, and the difference between them is not a matter of degree: one branch of the family has no medical coverage whatsoever. The card cannot tell you which branch you are looking at, because you have not chosen yet when you see it.

Read the third row again. A Non-Medical Package refunds your trip, replaces your suitcase, and pays nothing at all towards a hospital bill. It exists for travellers whose medical exposure is already handled, usually by an employer plan, and buying it by mistake is the most expensive error available on this contract.

The mirror error is buying Medical Only and expecting your deposit back. Trip cancellation and trip interruption are available on the comprehensive and non-medical packages only (Trip Cancellation, page 19). Cancellation coverage also starts on the purchase date rather than the departure date, so a policy bought the week before you fly protects almost nothing of what you already paid.

What your Canadian credit card already does, and where it stops

Plenty of Canadian cards advertise the same $5,000,000 emergency medical figure this policy carries, which is why so many travellers assume they are already covered. Our own audit of Canadian card wordings says the ceiling is rarely the problem. The clock and the birthday are, and the two cards below come from our own Canadian card database, read from the certificates of insurance we hold.

That is the honest case for buying a policy on top of a card you already hold: identical headline, completely different duration and a hard age wall. Check yours against ours in our credit card travel insurance comparison for Canada before assuming the card is enough, and remember that this contract pays second to any card benefit anyway, so holding both never pays you twice.

The annual product is not a year of continuous coverage, and it works the way most annual travel insurance does. It is a year during which any single trip is covered for its first 4, 8, 15 or 30 days, depending on the duration you bought, and a trip that runs longer is uncovered from the day the allowance runs out (General Terms, page 15). You can extend by buying a single-trip medical plan, but you have to do it before the original coverage ends.

One quirk is worth planning around. If you leave Canada more than once during a single trip without returning to your province in between, the allowance restarts each time you leave Canada. A Toronto traveller who flies to Miami, drives into Mexico and flies home has, on the contract's own wording, begun a second count on the Mexican leg. None of this has to be declared in advance, but you will have to prove your departure and return dates when you claim, with boarding passes or entry stamps.

The multi-trip comprehensive plan is also the only place in the whole document with a hard upper age: no more than 84 years old at the time of purchase (Introduction, page 4). The single-trip medical plans carry no maximum age at all. Of the 106 travellers named in the 61 quote sessions we recorded for this offer, the oldest was 84 exactly.

Cancellation on a multi-trip plan is a much smaller promise than on a single trip: $5,000 per trip instead of up to $40,000 (Table of Benefits, page 43). If what you are protecting is a $12,000 cruise, the annual plan is the wrong instrument.

Our comparator prints "from $25.00" on the SoNomad card. That number is a fixed floor stored against the offer, not a calculation, and it is the single most misleading thing on the card. On 8 September 2026 we ran the same card through 24 different trips and it returned $25.00 every single time.

Its two stablemates behave the same way: Comprehensive Package shows $28.00 and Travel Plan shows $32.00 on every trip we tested. So the ranking a Canadian sees on our comparator, SoNomad cheapest at $25, then $28, then $32, is an artefact of three stored numbers and tells you nothing about which is cheapest for your trip.

Set that against what a real quote looks like. On a 14-day trip to the United States for a 65-year-old, the one product in our Canadian results that actually prices the trip came back at $320.45, and on a full year, for a 35-year-old, it came back at $1,889.58. Whether SoNomad beats those numbers is genuinely unknown until you complete its form, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The offer's own marketing line in our records, "most competitive offer on the market", is neither supported nor contradicted by our data, because our data holds no SoNomad price at all.

A quarter of your bill. The policy asks you to call the assistance centre before obtaining emergency treatment so it can confirm coverage and pre-approve care, and if you do not, it pays 75% of what it would otherwise have paid (Emergency Medical exclusions c)4, page 34). The 25% you lose is yours, on top of whatever the rest of the policy does not cover.

The exception is written into the same clause and it is fair: if your condition made it medically impossible to call, the reduction does not apply. Someone can also call on your behalf. What the clause does not forgive is the traveller who simply walked into a clinic and dealt with it afterwards.

The pre-approval requirement goes further than the first call. Once treatment has started, the assistance centre must assess and pre-approve anything further, and the contract names what it means: MRI, MRCP, CAT scan, CT angiogram, sonograms, ultrasounds, nuclear stress tests, biopsies, angiograms, angioplasty, cardiac catheterization, cardiovascular surgery and any surgery at all. Undergo one of those without approval and the claim is not reduced, it is refused (Emergency Medical, page 30).

Two deadlines close the loop. Written proof of claim and the completed claim forms must reach the insurer within 90 days of the event and never more than 12 months after it (General Terms, page 16). Once the file is complete, settlement is due within 30 days, in Canadian currency (General Terms, page 15).

Two benefits the contract prices twice

The stability window is not the only place this policy states the same promise twice and does not agree with itself. Two of the benefits that matter most after a medical emergency abroad, getting you back to the trip you interrupted and getting your vehicle home, carry one figure in the article that describes them on page 33 and a different one in the Table of Benefits on page 43. Neither side is ambiguous. They simply contradict each other, so we publish both.

There is a tie-breaker of a kind, and it falls your way on only one of the two counts. The Summary of Plans tells you in as many words to refer to the Table of Benefits for all benefit limits, which points at $3,000 for the vehicle rather than the article's $5,000. But the table is also the more generous side on the return to your trip, offering a round trip where the article offers a one-way. Both of these benefits are arranged by the assistance centre rather than reimbursed after the fact, so the practical answer is the same either way: get the figure that applies to your plan confirmed by the assistance centre in writing before you authorize the expense.

Trip cancellation on this contract runs to 33 named reasons, which is a long list by Canadian standards, and the useful question is not how many there are but which ones a real traveller ever uses. Coverage starts on the purchase date and runs to the day the trip was due to begin, the usual shape for trip cancellation insurance, up to the sum you insured, capped at $40,000 (Trip Cancellation, page 19).

The reasons most travellers claim on

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  Serious illness, injury or death: Yours, a family member's, an extended family member's on death, your caregiver's, a key employee's, a travel companion's, or your service animal's.
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  Quarantine: You, your spouse, your travel companion or their spouse.
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  Involuntary job loss: Permanent, not your fault, and the job must have been permanent employment held for at least 6 continuous months.
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  A new job: Starting at a company you had not worked for in the previous 6 months.
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  A Government of Canada travel advisory: "Avoid non-essential travel" or "Avoid all travel" issued for your destination after you bought the coverage.
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  A visa refused: Unexpected failure of the grant of a visa, for reasons beyond your control.
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  Your home becomes uninhabitable: After the purchase date.
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  Jury duty or a court summons: Provided the summons was issued after you bought the policy.

The ones that read generously and pay narrowly

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  Pregnancy: Covered if you conceive after booking and the departure falls within 9 weeks of the due date or later. Complications are covered only within the first 31 weeks.
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  Bad weather and natural disasters: Only if they delay at least 30% of your trip and you then choose not to travel. A ruined weekend is not 30%.
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  A travel supplier going under: $3,500 per person, and only for a Canadian supplier, subject to an annual aggregate across all failures.
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  An act of terrorism: Only at your destination, only within 30 days of departure, and only if that city had not already suffered one in the 30 days before your policy started.
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  A cruise or tour cancelled before you leave: Up to $2,500 of separately booked airfare, and not the cost of the cruise or tour itself.
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  Anything already known when you bought: Any reason, event or medical condition known on or before the purchase date is excluded outright, twice over in the same list.

Two structural exclusions do more work than any of the named reasons. A pandemic or contagious disease announced before your departure date is out, and so is any strike that began or was announced before you bought. And if a supplier hands you a credit or a voucher for the full value, the policy treats you as reimbursed, including when you were offered one and turned it down (Trip Cancellation, page 21).

Only 9 of the 61 SoNomad quote sessions we recorded between April and September 2026 asked for cancellation coverage at all. On the evidence of our own funnel, this is a policy Canadians reach for to cover their health, not their deposit.

Three hard edges bound this contract, and our own quote form respects only one of them cleanly. The trip length cap is 365 days (General Terms, page 14), and our comparator enforces it: a 366-day trip returns no offers at all, from anyone. The other two are looser on our side than in the wording.

The eleven places the policy does not go

Buried in the definition of travel advisory, on page 12, is the only unambiguous list in the document: the policy provides coverage in the countries included in the trip you booked, except for Iran, Syria, North Korea, Crimea, Ukraine in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, Belarus, the Russian Federation, Venezuela, Libya, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. The clause is an international sanctions carve-out and it is not negotiable, because paying such a claim would expose the insurer to United Nations, Canadian, European, French, British and United States sanctions law.

We tested all eleven on our own comparator on 8 September 2026 and every one of them returned this offer as an available product, with no warning attached. If your destination is on that list, the honest answer is that this policy will not respond there, whatever our form lets you quote.

Outside the medical section the contract turns modest, and the numbers are worth knowing before you assume your camera is protected. Baggage and personal effects are covered to $2,000 on the comprehensive and non-medical packages, with a sub-limit of $500 per item or per set of items (Table of Benefits, pages 43 and 44).

Electronics are the notable hole. The contract's definition of baggage is "the clothes and belongings that are necessary for personal use and hygiene", inside a suitcase, "but excluding money, jewellery, electronics, digital equipment and documents" (Definitions, page 8). A stolen laptop, phone, camera or tablet is outside the coverage before any exclusion is even reached. So is anything left unattended in a public place or stored in an unsecured area.

What is not in this contract at all

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  Personal liability: There is no third-party liability benefit anywhere in the 51 pages. If you injure someone or damage property abroad, the policy is silent.
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  Search and rescue: No mountain rescue, no search costs, no helicopter. Nothing.
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  A ski or mountain package: No lift pass refund and no piste rescue. Your skis are covered as sporting equipment inside the $2,000 baggage limit, and that is the whole of it.
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  Rental car damage: Not a benefit of this contract, whatever older articles about the brand may say.
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  Cancel for any reason: Only the 33 named reasons. There is no all-causes option on this wording.
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  Adventure and dangerous sports: A long named list is excluded from medical, cancellation, baggage and accident coverage alike: boxing, martial arts, mountaineering, caving, scuba below 20 metres or without a dive master, paragliding, skydiving, hang-gliding, horse riding, hot-air ballooning, rafting, bungee and any high-altitude activity.

Our own record for this offer marks ski insurance as unavailable, which is right about the mountain package and slightly harsh about the equipment: skis are sporting equipment and sporting equipment is a named covered class. Recreational downhill skiing itself is not on the excluded list either, although ski jumping is. If you are going to a resort, the practical reading is that a fall is treated as an ordinary medical claim and your gear is treated as baggage.

This is the part that works differently from every other product we compare, and you should know it before you start. HelloSafe does not sell this policy. There is no checkout on our site for it, no payment page and no processing fee, because the product is a lead-generation offer: we hand you to SoNomad and SoNomad completes the sale.

Two consequences follow. The first is that nothing on our side is a commitment: submitting the contact form does not buy anything and does not lock a price. The second is that the underwriting happens after you leave us. The medical questionnaire that sets a 65-year-old's premium is on SoNomad's form, not ours, and the price you finally see may bear no relation to the $25.00 our card printed.

The 10-day free look is the one place the contract cannot decide when your clock starts. The introduction gives you 10 days from the date you purchase your policy (page 5). The Cancellation Rights clause in the General Terms gives you 10 days from the date you receive your policy documentation (page 14). If your documents land a few days after you pay, those are two different deadlines, and the purchase-date reading is the shorter one. Work to the purchase date and you are inside the window on either reading. Within it you can cancel and get the full premium back, unless you have already departed or started a claim. After that the premium is non-refundable, with narrow exceptions: the supplier cancelling the trip with all penalties waived, the supplier changing the dates in a way you cannot travel, or cancelling before any penalties bite. Medical Only plans additionally allow a partial refund of unused days if you come home early and can prove it (General Terms, page 14).

Two features decide this: a very high medical ceiling with no age cap on the single-trip medical plans, and nothing at all outside the medical and trip-disruption core. That combination fits some travellers precisely and fails others.

The pattern in our own funnel matches that. Across 61 quote sessions and 106 travellers, the median age was 55 and the median trip 23 days, but the distribution is bimodal: 37 travellers were under 30 and 49 were 60 or older, with relatively few in between. The top destinations were France, the United States, Germany, Japan and Italy, and only 9 sessions in 61 asked for cancellation coverage at all.

• Is SoNomad an insurance company?

  No. SoNomad is a Montreal-based insurance-of-persons firm, founded in 2019 by Mathieu Laplante and Eve Murphy, that distributes travel insurance. The policy behind this offer is issued and underwritten by Europ Assistance S.A. Canada Branch, which also provides all assistance and claims administration services under it. Europ Assistance S.A. Canada Branch is federally regulated and listed on the federal register of financial institutions as a foreign property and casualty insurer with accident and sickness among its authorized classes. You deal with SoNomad for the quote and the purchase, and with the insurer for emergencies and claims.

• How much medical coverage does the policy actually provide?

  Up to $5,000,000 on the comprehensive package plans and the emergency medical plans, per the Table of Benefits on page 43. The non-medical package plans carry no medical coverage at all. Two conditions can cut the figure sharply: it drops to a $25,000 maximum if you do not hold valid provincial or territorial health plan coverage for the whole trip, and the insurer pays only 75% of what it otherwise would if you did not call the assistance centre before treatment.

• What does this SoNomad review conclude about the price?

  That we cannot tell you one. The card in our comparator shows a fixed $25.00 starting price that did not change across 24 different trips we quoted on 8 September 2026, from 14 days to 365 days and from age 35 to age 90. It is a stored floor, not a calculation. Its two stablemates behave identically at $28.00 and $32.00. Get the real number from SoNomad’s own form, then compare it against the computed quotes on the same trip.

• Up to what age can I buy it?

  There is no maximum age on the single-trip and multi-trip medical plans or on the single-trip comprehensive package. The multi-trip comprehensive plan stops at 84 at the time of purchase. A medical questionnaire is required from age 60 on the multi-trip and single-trip medical plans, and from age 75 on the single-trip international comprehensive package. Our own quote form is more permissive than the contract on the annual plan: it returned this offer for an 85-year-old on 8 September 2026, which the multi-trip wording does not allow.

• Are pre-existing conditions covered?

  Conditionally. A pre-existing condition is covered if it was stable throughout a look-back window before departure: 90 days if you are under 60, and either 120 or 365 days if you are over 60, depending on which paragraph of the exclusion you apply, because the contract states both without a rule of precedence. Heart and lung conditions carry their own 90-day tests, and any nitroglycerin taken for angina, or oxygen or prednisone for a lung condition, breaks them. Stable is defined strictly: a single change of dose is enough to break the window.

• Does it cover a trip inside Canada, outside my province?

  Yes. Emergency medical coverage begins when you leave your province or territory of residence, not when you leave the country, and ends when you return to it. On a multi-trip plan a trip entirely inside Canada gets 60 days of coverage instead of the 4, 8, 15 or 30 days a foreign trip gets. Note that the contract’s definition of “abroad” is written as though domestic travel were outside the coverage; the operative clauses and the multi-trip section both say otherwise.

• Is skiing covered?

  An ordinary skiing accident is treated as an ordinary medical claim: recreational downhill skiing is not on the excluded-activities list, although ski jumping is. Your skis are covered as sporting equipment inside the $2,000 baggage limit, at actual cash value, with a $500 per-item sub-limit and 75% of value if you have no receipt. What does not exist on this wording is a mountain package: no lift pass refund, no piste rescue and no search and rescue benefit of any kind.

• Is there any liability coverage?

  None. There is no personal liability, no rental accommodation liability and no rental car damage benefit anywhere in the 51 pages. If that matters for your trip, this is not the contract for it, and you should look at a policy that names liability in its table of benefits.

• What happens if I am pregnant?

  Complications of pregnancy are covered up to the 31st week. Pregnancy, delivery and complications of either arising within 9 weeks of the expected delivery date or at any time after it are excluded, as is routine prenatal and postnatal care, and any child born during the trip. On the cancellation side, becoming pregnant after you book is a covered reason to cancel if the departure falls inside that same 9-week window or later.

• What are the trip cancellation limits?

  Up to the sum you insured, capped at $40,000 on a single trip, and $5,000 per trip on the comprehensive multi-trip plan. Thirty-three reasons are named, including serious illness, death, quarantine, involuntary job loss after six continuous months of permanent employment, a Government of Canada “Avoid non-essential travel” or “Avoid all travel” advisory issued after purchase, and an unexpected visa refusal. Coverage starts on the purchase date, so buying late protects little.

• Which destinations are excluded?

  Eleven, listed under the definition of travel advisory on page 12: Iran, Syria, North Korea, Crimea, the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, Belarus, the Russian Federation, Venezuela, Libya, Afghanistan and Myanmar. It is an international sanctions clause and it is not negotiable. Our quote form does not currently stop you from quoting those destinations, so check yours against that list yourself.

• How do I claim, and how long do I have?

  Call the assistance centre before any treatment, on 1-888-777-6513 toll-free from Canada and the continental United States. File written proof of claim and the completed forms within 90 days of the event, and never more than 12 months after it. Claims go to eacan.eclaims.europ-assistance.com or claims@europ-assistance.ca. Once the file is complete, settlement is due within 30 days, in Canadian funds.

• Can I cancel the policy after buying it?

  Yes, but read the deadline twice, because the contract states it twice and not identically. Its introduction gives you 10 days from the date you purchase the policy (page 5); its Cancellation Rights clause gives you 10 days from the date you receive your policy documentation (page 14). Working to the purchase date keeps you inside both. Within the window you get a full refund, unless you have already departed or started a claim. After that the premium is non-refundable, with narrow exceptions: the travel supplier cancelling the trip with all penalties waived, the supplier changing the dates so you cannot travel, or cancelling before any penalties apply. Medical Only plans additionally allow a partial refund of unused days if you come home early and can prove your return.

Our comparator returns very little to a Canadian address, and it is worth being honest about why. Most of the plans in our catalogue are sold by European brokers to European residents, and their departure rules exclude Canada. What is left for a Canadian is three offers distributed by SoNomad and two computed products from a French mutual, and the second group disappears as soon as the traveller turns 66 or the trip runs long.

Outside our comparator there is more Canadian choice than that, and we review it: AIG travel insurance in Canada, Aviva travel insurance in Canada, Zurich travel insurance in Canada and Genki travel insurance in Canada are all covered elsewhere on this site. But within our own quote form, that is the real argument for going through SoNomad rather than around it: from age 66, or on a very long trip, it is the only Canadian route our comparator can offer at all. It is also the reason the price on the card matters so little. There is no computed alternative to benchmark it against for exactly the travellers most likely to need it.

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

Our recommendation for a Canadian trip

If you are over 65, or wintering away for months, start with the SoNomad route and get the real quote: the $5,000,000 ceiling with no age cap on the single-trip medical plans is genuinely at the top of the Canadian market, and from age 66 our comparator returns nothing else that prices your trip. Ask for a Comprehensive or a Medical plan by name, never the Non-Medical package, and confirm the stability window that applies to your age and plan in writing before you pay. If you are under 60 and travelling for a few weeks, do the opposite: take the computed quotes below first, because you can actually see what they cost, then check whether SoNomad’s real number beats them. And whatever your age, if you need liability coverage or you are diving, climbing or rafting, this contract is not the one, because it names none of that.

SoNomadInsured by Europ Assistance

FromCA$25.00

Included coverage

International emergency medical expensesCA$5,000,000

Direct billingIncluded

Trip cancellationOptional

Trip interruptionCA$3,500

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Comprehensive PackageInsured by Allianz

FromCA$28.00

Included coverage

International emergency medical expensesCA$10,000,000

Direct billingIncluded

Trip cancellationOptional

Trip interruptionCA$1,500

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Travel PlanInsured by Manuvie

FromCA$32.00

Included coverage

International emergency medical expensesCA$10,000,000

Direct billingIncluded

Trip cancellationOptional

Trip interruptionCA$2,000

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Go ExploreInsured by MGEN

FromCA$225.49

Included coverage

International emergency medical expensesCA$390,000

Direct billingIncluded

Trip cancellationNot included

Trip interruptionReturn ticket

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Go Explore +Insured by MGEN

FromCA$244.28

Included coverage

International emergency medical expensesCA$790,000

Direct billingIncluded

Trip cancellationNot included

Trip interruptionReturn ticket

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Live results captured on hellosafe.com on 8 September 2026 for 1 traveller aged 63, 23 days in France (5 to 28 November 2026), departing from Canada, a $4,000 trip, without the cancellation option, in Canadian dollars. Read the prices carefully: SoNomad, Comprehensive Package and Travel Plan each show a fixed starting price stored against the offer, not a quote for this trip, and it does not change with age, destination or duration. Only Go Explore and Go Explore + priced this trip. Coverage ceilings shown on the cards are the ones that apply to the quoted destination.