Somebody comes off a scooter, or eats the wrong thing, or goes over on an ankle walking down from a viewpoint. It is a medical question for about ten minutes. Then it is a money question for the rest of the week, and no group has ever discussed that part in advance.
The medical part usually resolves faster than people fear. The bill arrives in a currency you are not thinking in, someone hands over a card because the person who is hurt is in no state to argue about it, and the trip carries on with a new and unspoken debt in it.
What the group actually splits
The treatment belongs to the person treated. That one is easy and almost nobody disputes it.
Everything around it is where groups get stuck, because none of it has an obvious owner:
- The taxi to the clinic and back, twice, at whatever a taxi costs at 11pm.
- The activity everyone else skipped to sit in a waiting room, already paid for and not refundable.
- The changed flight, if it comes to that, and the extra night that goes with it.
- The friend who stayed behind and now needs their own way to the airport.
Most groups do the decent thing and absorb these quietly, which is correct and also how one or two people end up carrying a few hundred euros they never mention. The fix is not a policy. It is writing the amounts down as they happen, so that at the end of the trip the group can decide what to do about them with real numbers in front of it. A group that can see "€180 of hospital taxis and a missed boat tour" will usually just split it. A group working from memory argues about whether it was even that much.
The boring conversation to have before you go
Ask the group one question in the planning chat: is everyone covered? Not as a lecture. As a question with a yes or no, because the answers vary more than people assume. Some are covered by the card they bought the flights with. Anyone insured under an EU social security system can carry the European Health Insurance Card, which is genuinely useful and narrower than people think: it covers state treatment, and it does nothing about a repatriation or a missed flight. It also has to be applied for in advance, so the friend who assumes they have one usually does not. Some have nothing and have never thought about it.
The one to check hardest is anyone doing something with an engine or an altitude. Scooters and anything described as an adventure activity are the two things standard policies most often exclude, and they are exactly what groups do on holiday.
If somebody in the group needs cover and does not have it, EKTA sells short policies you can buy per person for the days you are away, which suits a group where only two people are missing cover.
Affiliate link. You pay their price, Billy earns a commission on it, and that is the whole business model of an app that does not charge you or run ads.
We find this one uncomfortable to write about, and you can probably tell. Most policies are money you spend and never see again, and saying "buy insurance" to a group of friends going away for four days sounds like an ad. It usually is one.
The reason it is here anyway is that the trips where this mattered are the ones people still talk about years later, and the detail they remember is never the injury. It is who paid, and how long it took to sort out.