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For your average student going away for a weekend, or even a week, travel insurance is rarely regarded as an essential. The general perception exists that the principal purpose of travel insurance is to cover medical costs abroad in the eventuality of something going horribly awry. No one intends to be hurt or fall ill whilst travelling, and in general as the odds of anything adverse happening are low, insurance can – and often is – perceived as an extra and unnecessary expense.

Of course, the point of insurance is that it is there to cover if the unlikely happens, and the more times that it is unnecessary the better. This is not a reason not to have it though, because for the ten times that the insurance policy is not required, there will be one time when it suddenly becomes the most essential item you could possibly have taken with you.

So, how to get around this problem of people travelling without any insurance? Well firstly the above-mentioned misconception needs to be addressed. Yes, medical costs are a large component of the cost of a policy, but it also covers emergency evacuation to excess rental car damage and just about every possible disaster (big or small) in between.

For the person travelling on a budget, however, who has decided to forgo travel insurance in order to save a few pennies (and it is only a few pennies at the time of writing single policies could be obtained from Churchill for £10, AA Travel Insurance for a similar sum, and Essential Travel’s travel insurance for only £7) the most important eventuality that travel insurance covers has got to be loss, theft, or damage to personal possessions.

Broadly speaking when you chose to take the step from hotel to hostel you expect a certain drop in standard to go along with the drop in price. Sometimes, unfortunately, that drop in standard comes in the form of the security of the rooms. Nearly everyone knows someone who has had something stolen whilst travelling - although, it is curious how often something that is ‘lost’ eventually gets represented as something that was ‘stolen’ when hostels are involved. At any rate, the fact remains that things do go missing when travelling, and the smaller the budget that you’re travelling on, the greater the risk of things going missing.

At which point the fact that your travel insurance policy covers loss of personal possessions can be incredibly useful. The attitude that insurance is an unnecessary expense is one that swiftly reverses when the £7 saved on not having insurance is wiped out by having to spend £200 to replace items that have gone missing.

Ultimately, though, whether people take out travel insurance or not is something that is up to them – and there’s no way of enforcing that people do. For the benefits that travel insurance offers, surely the few minutes and the few pounds that are spent to get a policy is an investment worth making.