What Happens If You Get Sick While Traveling Abroad
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Short on time? Here’s the sequence.
- Tell your accommodation, because they’ll find the nearest clinic and call a taxi when rideshares won’t come.
- Call your travel medical insurance first if you have it, because they’ll send you somewhere that bills them directly.
- Go sooner than feels necessary, because dehydration escalates faster than you think.
- Take photos of every receipt and document, including the taxi.
- Tell your tour operator or hotel you’re not coming before they charge you as a no-show.
We got E. coli on day eleven of a sixteen-day trip to Scotland, three days into a bus tour we’d already paid for, in a hotel that was fully booked and couldn’t extend us.
Here’s exactly what that looked like, what it cost, and what we’d do differently.
What actually happened to us
Our first trip to Scotland was sixteen days long, with a three-day bus tour in the middle running out of Edinburgh and up through the Highlands.
Culloden Battlefield was the last stop of day one, and Nick had been dragging all afternoon without saying much. By the time I realized how bad he felt, the visitor centre was closing and he was still inside. I ended up standing in front of the staff saying “I’m so sorry, my husband is still in there” while they held the doors.
The drive back to Inverness takes twenty minutes and I have never watched time move slower. He spent all of it gray and silent in a seat he couldn’t get out of, on a bus he couldn’t ask to stop.
He couldn’t get out of bed the next day. I went to the Isle of Skye without him. And somewhere around one in the morning after I got back, it hit me like a dump truck, so much worse than he’d let on.
By morning I couldn’t leave the room.
What to do if you get sick abroad
Working from what we got right and what we fumbled.
1. Tell your accommodation immediately. This is the single most useful thing we did. Our hotel called us a taxi when no Uber would come, and they knew which hospital to send us to. Front desks deal with this more than you’d think.
2. Call your insurance before you go anywhere. We didn’t have any, which is why this took us hours instead of one phone call. A travel medical insurance provider will direct you to a facility that bills them directly, so you’re not fronting the cost.
3. Don’t wait it out. We both did, and both of us got worse. Dehydration is what actually puts you in hospital, and it escalates quickly.
4. Tell your tour or hotel you’re not coming. We sent Nick downstairs to tell the bus driver, and he tipped them on the way out. Neither of us said what was actually happening because we were mortified, and I’m fairly sure they assumed we were two Americans who’d overdone it at the pub. We let them think it, which I’ve regretted ever since.
5. Photograph everything. Receipts, discharge paperwork, prescriptions, even the taxi. If you do have coverage, you’ll need it, and nobody is organized while they’re sick.
What a hospital abroad is actually like
The medicine is fine. It’s everything around the medicine that’s frightening, because you don’t know how any of it works.
You don’t know how you’ll be seen. You don’t know what you’ll be asked to pay, or whether the card in your wallet will be accepted, or what happens if they decide to keep you overnight and your flight home is in eleven days.
Getting there was its own problem. We couldn’t get an Uber to come, so the hotel called a taxi, and I spent the ride white-knuckling it in the back of a stranger’s car.
The answer, in my case, was E. coli, from chicken we’d eaten the night before the tour started. I was dehydrated and confused enough that I don’t remember all of it clearly.
What getting sick abroad actually cost us
The hospital was the cheapest part. Here’s where the money went.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| The rest of a 3-day bus tour | Paid for, never used |
| An extra night in Inverness | Hotel was full, had to find another across town |
| Extra meals | Not in the plan |
| A hotel in Edinburgh | Booked months earlier, sat empty that night |
| Train back to Edinburgh | To catch up with our own itinerary |
| Hospital visit and taxi | The part everyone expects |
Costs are approximate and from 2024. Prices change, so treat this as a shape rather than a quote.
Every single line above except the last one is something travel medical insurance is built to absorb. All of it came out of our pocket instead, because we’d decided years earlier that the whole category was a waste. We wrote about how we got over ourselves in is travel medical insurance actually worth it.
The part nobody insures: your PTO
The most expensive thing we lost that week wasn’t money. It was time off we can never get back.
Three days of a trip we’d saved for and booked months out. Not three days of ordinary life, three of the sixteen we’d fought to get approved. Nick missed almost the entire tour he paid for. I did Skye alone. Neither of us saw the last day at all.
If you get fifteen days of PTO a year, losing three to a hotel room in Inverness is not a small thing. You can’t buy them back and you can’t reschedule them for a Tuesday in November when you feel better.
No policy on earth refunds that. What coverage does do is stop one bad day from taking the days behind it, which is exactly what happened to us.
When one of you is sick and the other isn’t
Somebody goes and somebody stays, and you both feel bad about it.
I went to Skye alone, and it was beautiful, and I spent most of it feeling guilty and a little sad. I checked my phone at every stop where I could get a signal and burned through my battery filming everything so Nick could at least see it later. I’d packed an extra charger for exactly that reason.
But I couldn’t bring myself to skip it. It was the part of the trip I’d been dreaming about for months, and if I’d stayed behind I’d have been crushed about missing it and probably a little unfairly upset with him.
A lot of couples have had some version of that day and don’t talk about it, probably because it’s embarrassing to admit you went and did the fun thing without the person you came with. So I’ll go first. I went to Skye without my husband, and I’d do it again.
Here’s the actual advice. Decide before the trip what you’d do, because deciding while one of you is miserable is how it turns into a fight. Ours is now simple: if one of us is down and the thing is non-refundable or once-in-a-lifetime, the other goes, and nobody gets to be weird about it afterward.
What we’d do differently
Know how you’d get help before you need it. My instinct that morning was to call my mom, which tells you how much of a plan we had, and also that she was an ocean away and couldn’t do a single thing about it.
Don’t assume your hotel can flex. Ours was fully booked and so was every other one on that street. Nick walked our bags a mile and a half across Inverness to a room he found on foot.
Build in a buffer day. Our trip was scheduled edge to edge, so one bad day knocked over everything behind it, including a hotel we paid for and never slept in.
Buy travel medical insurance when you book the flights. Not the week before you leave. It takes about five minutes and it’s the only travel decision we’ve ever regretted skipping.
Price out coverage at the same time you book your flights. Five minutes, and it’s the difference between one bad day and three lost ones. See what it costs for your dates →
The part we want you to take away
Nothing about that trip was dramatic or remote. It was chicken, in a country with excellent hospitals, no language barrier and clean water.
That’s the point. The trips that feel safest are the ones where we show up with the least preparation, and preparation is a much easier problem to solve than it sounds.
We went back to Scotland two years later and it was one of the best weeks we’ve ever had.
Frequently asked questions
Keep planning your trip
Headed to Scotland? We’ve written up our 10 days in Scotland itinerary (coming soon) and our take on Rabbie’s small group tours if you’d rather somebody else did the driving.
