Travel insurance premiums to Turkey have risen 46% over the past year, from £40.56 in early 2025 to £59.19 a year later, the sharpest increase among five popular UK holiday destinations analysed in new data from comparison site Quotezone.co.uk across 5,000 quotes. Bulgaria, within range of the wider Black Sea conflict zone, saw premiums rise 19% from Ukraine proximity, with Cyprus, Egypt and Poland recording smaller increases of 6%, 4% and 8% respectively. The pricing divergence is arriving alongside tightened FCA signposting rules that together raise the documentation and fair value obligation for brokers placing conflict-adjacent travel business to a level that did not exist at the same intensity a year ago.
The FCA's Handbook Notice 133, published October 2025 and effective from January 1, 2026, raised the threshold triggering referral to specialist medical condition directories from £100 to £200, and introduced a one-entry-per-firm rule eliminating brand stacking - where firms appeared under multiple names in ways the regulator judged offered limited consumer benefit. The changes apply across insurers, Lloyd's managing agents, intermediaries and appointed representatives writing UK retail travel business. For brokers advising on Turkey, Bulgaria or other conflict-adjacent destinations, the combination is specific: destination-level premiums are diverging sharply at the same moment the FCA has tightened how cover options must be presented and what constitutes fair value in the retail travel market.
ABI members paid out £472 million across more than 500,000 travel insurance claims in 2024, underlining why accurate destination-level pricing matters commercially as well as reputationally. Helen Rolph, travel insurance expert at Quotezone, said premiums can rise even where a destination remains popular if the wider region becomes more uncertain - a dynamic directly visible in the Turkey and Bulgaria figures. The ABI has said that travelling against FCDO advice is likely to invalidate a traveller's policy, and most mass-market policies continue to exclude war, invasion and armed conflict as standard. Those exclusions widen as tensions escalate, making proactive client communication on FCDO-linked exclusions a compliance obligation rather than simply good service.
The retail pricing shift sits alongside a related but distinct trend in the commercial market. Political risk insurance is expected to see rising uptake through 2026 as insurers price for a more volatile geopolitical backdrop, according to GlobalData, which has pointed to strikes affecting commercial property between Israel and Iran as one driver of demand. Aon's Q1 2026 Global Insurance Market Insights similarly flagged geopolitical risk as a factor cutting across commercial pricing decisions by geography and risk quality. The two markets are priced independently, but both reflect insurers treating the same regional instability as a harder underwriting input.
As destination pricing diverges more sharply and FCA directory presentation rules tighten, clearly recording what has been explained to a client about FCDO-linked exclusions, fair value and the limits of standard war exclusions is likely to matter more over the renewal cycles ahead. The January 2026 rule changes mean that how cover options are presented is now as much a compliance question as a sales one - and the destinations generating the sharpest premium increases are precisely the ones where the gap between what a client expects and what their policy covers is widest.
