Adventure Sports Cover

Winter sports, including recreational skiing and snowboarding on marked pistes.

Scuba diving, commonly excluded outright or permitted only to a stated depth and only with certification.

Trekking and mountaineering above a specified altitude, with thresholds that catch a good deal of ordinary Himalayan and Alpine walking.

Bungee jumping, skydiving, paragliding, hang-gliding and similar.

White-water rafting above a stated grade, and other water sports involving powered craft.

Motorsport of any kind, and in many wordings riding a motorcycle at all, or riding one above a stated engine capacity or without a helmet and valid licence.

Anything undertaken professionally, competitively, or for payment, which is excluded even where the amateur version is covered.

It brings the medical expenses, evacuation and repatriation benefits back into play for injuries sustained during the named activities. That is the substance of it, and evacuation is often the reason it matters — a mountain or dive-site evacuation is expensive and logistically specialised.

It does not usually restore personal liability cover for the activity, so injuring another skier may remain outside the policy even with the add-on.

It rarely covers the equipment. Damaged or lost skis, dive gear or a bicycle sit under baggage cover with its own exclusions and sub-limits.

It does not cover the activity going wrong commercially — a cancelled dive, a closed piste, a refused permit. Those are trip benefits, if they are covered at all.

Conditions almost always attach: using a licensed operator, wearing prescribed safety equipment, staying within marked areas, and holding the relevant certification. Breach any of them and the exclusion returns.

Altitude thresholds are the most common source of a declined trek claim, because the number in the wording is often lower than travellers assume.

Popular routes in Nepal and the Indian Himalaya routinely cross altitudes above the limits set in standard wordings, and the exclusion applies to any claim arising while you were above it — including altitude sickness itself, which is the most likely claim.

Helicopter evacuation from a high trekking route is expensive and, in the well-documented experience of Nepal's trekking industry, subject to close scrutiny by insurers before it is authorised.

Read the stated altitude, compare it against the highest point on your itinerary rather than the average, and confirm the add-on covers trekking specifically rather than only organised mountaineering.

List every activity you might plausibly do, not only the planned ones. A day of parasailing decided on holiday is exactly the uninsured claim this add-on exists to prevent.

Check the wording names your activity. A general 'adventure sports' heading with a schedule that omits scuba is not cover for scuba.

Confirm whether evacuation is included for the activity and up to what limit, since that is the largest cost.

Where the trip is built around a single serious activity — a diving holiday, a high-altitude trek, a ski season — specialist cover from an operator or federation is often broader and cheaper than an add-on to a general travel policy.

Winter sports generate more adventure-sports claims than anything else, and two of the costs involved are routinely uninsured.

Piste rescue. Being brought down a mountain by ski patrol or, in a serious case, by helicopter is charged to the injured party in most European resorts, and the bills are substantial. Some winter-sports add-ons include it; a general adventure add-on often does not.

The unused portion of what you paid for. A lift pass, ski hire and lessons paid for in advance are lost if you are injured on day one, and only a dedicated winter-sports extension usually reimburses them.

Off-piste skiing is excluded by most wordings even where on-piste is covered, and 'off-piste with a guide' is covered by some and not others. If you intend to ski outside marked runs, establish this specifically.

Equipment is baggage, not adventure cover, and is subject to the baggage sub-limits — which for hired equipment you are contractually liable for can be a genuine gap.