The conditions-led buyer is a search audience, not an age band.
Diane, 58
Travels twice a year, declares a condition
Declares it every time, and dreads the question.
- Apr 2021 the FCA signposting regime built for buyers like her note 5
- 21,000 additional policies the specialist directory added note 5
- £200 extra premium for the condition that triggers signposting, from 1 January 2026 note 5
Illustrative composite. Not a real person.
An audience brief, same format as the suits brief: the category’s buyers, built from the public shelf. The category is UK travel insurance. Everything below is public and cited, and nothing comes from inside any account.
The volume
94.6 million visits abroad in 2024, £78.6 billion spent, and around half of adults took no trip at all. The travelling minority funds the annual policies.
UK residents made an estimated 94.6 million visits abroad in 2024 and spent £78.6 billion doing it. By purpose: 55.8 million holiday trips, 25.4 million visits to friends and relatives, 7.8 million business trips.
Holidays are the market: 55.8 million trips of 94.6 million.
Divide by the population and you get 1.39 trips per resident. Industry survey work suggests only around half of adults took any trip abroad in a year, so the mean is spread across people who never went. Trips concentrate in a travelling minority, and that minority is where annual multi-trip policies make their money.
The age structure
The over-65s made 9.79 million trips abroad in 2024, effectively back to their 9.94 million of 2019, and their spend rose from £8.1 billion to £9.9 billion, up 23% in cash terms. Everyone aged 55 and over accounts for 23.4 million trips, a quarter of the 91.4 million the age table covers. The oldest travellers are the segment insurers price hardest, and they have returned to the market at full volume with more money.
Older travellers came back in the same numbers, spending more in cash.
The health picture
At 65 to 69, around two thirds of people report good or very good health. The sharp deterioration arrives after 75.
Age is the industry’s proxy for risk. The census says the proxy is crude. At 65 to 69, around two thirds of people report good or very good health, and roughly 27% are disabled under the Equality Act definition. The sharp deterioration arrives after 75, where the disabled share passes a third and keeps climbing.
The proxy is crude: at 65 to 69 most people are not disabled.
The 65-to-74 traveller is mostly a healthy person paying an age premium.
The regulator noticed the other side of this. Travellers with pre-existing conditions were served poorly enough that the FCA built a signposting regime. Since April 2021, any firm selling travel cover must point consumers with medical-condition premiums toward a directory of specialist providers, and from January 2026 the trigger rises from £100 to £200 of medical loading. The FCA’s own review estimates the intervention produced about 21,000 additional policy sales, fewer than it expected.
The channel
By 2020, 65% of over-65s had shopped online, while only 54% of the over-75s were recent internet users. Phone and branch still carry the oldest, most premium segment.
The official internet-use series stopped in 2020, so these are the latest published figures and not the current state. By early 2020, 65% of over-65s had shopped online, up from 16% in 2008, while only 54% of the over-75s were recent internet users at all. The younger old buy online. At the top of the age curve, the phone and the branch still matter, and a channel plan that assumes everyone comparison-shops in a browser writes off the segment with the most premium attached.
The segments
Four buyers: the annual multi-trip household, the healthy active over-65, the conditions-led buyer the FCA signposts, and the late-booking single-tripper.
The annual multi-trip household: the travelling minority, several trips a year, buys once annually, decided on renewal not at booking. The healthy active over-65: back to full trip volume, spend up, mostly good health, priced by an age proxy that overstates their risk. The conditions-led buyer: any age, needs declared cover, FCA-signposted toward specialists, underserved by the FCA’s own account. The occasional single-tripper: roughly half the adult population in any year, buys late if at all, price-led, reached at the booking moment or not at all.
What I would do
Split the plan on need, not age: search for the conditions-led buyer, renewal-week equity for the annual policy, the booking hour for the single-tripper.
The conditions-led buyer is a search audience with explicit, high-intent language, and the January 2026 trigger change is a dated planning event in that market. The annual policy is a renewal relationship, which makes it equity work: the brand has to be the one remembered in the one week a year the policy is considered. Split the plan on need, not age. The single-tripper is won in the hour the flight is booked. And the healthy over-65 is the growth argument. Trip volume is back to 2019, spend is higher, and the census health tables will support pricing and creative that treat them as travellers first.
Where this argument is weakest
Travel Trends is mid-redesign with a known coding error, the health data is self-reported from 2021, and no public dataset shows policy purchases.
Travel Trends 2024 is stitched from two survey designs mid-redesign, carries an airport-coding error the ONS plans to correct by October 2026, and its purpose and age tables run on a slightly smaller base than the headline figure. The trip-frequency skew rests partly on an industry body’s consumer survey, marked as such. The census health data is self-reported, covers England and Wales, and dates from 2021. The internet series ends in 2020. No public dataset shows policy purchases. This brief reads travel behaviour and health as the demand structure. Claims cost is a different question and needs different data. And the named person in the card is a composite, assembled from the figures in the notes.