Taking out travel insurance before heading off for a holiday outside the UK should be an easy task. But how do you ensure that you get a good deal?

There are two key ways of doing so.

The first is always to shop around. Prices vary considerably between insurers and your personal circumstances can make a huge difference to the policy.

The second is to ask yourself how many times you intend to travel within a year. If you are certain you will only travel once, then cheap travel insurance can quite easily be found in the form of a single-trip policy for as little as £9.

If you intend to travel two or more times then this could prove to be expensive, especially for families.

This is where a multi-trip policy will come to your rescue. Many family policies cover not just the adult couple but several children. They can be found for as little as £23 for a single person and allow you to make several trips abroad during the year.

As you can imagine, if you intend to travel abroad three times a year and pay £9 each time, while a multi-trip comes in at around £23 per person, you’ve just saved £4.

This might sound like a small saving but as you start to increase the number of trips per year and the number of people travelling on one policy, the saving you make on your travel insurance becomes much bigger.

However, there is one crucial point to remember. While we all like to find the cheapest travel insurance before we go abroad, we shouldn’t lose sight of the reasons for buying the cover in the first place.

It can be easy to look only for the cheapest policy in an effort to save money, but the reality is you could be missing out on vital aspects of cover.