War Risk Insurance: What Corporate Travel Policies Miss in 2026

A senior project engineer from a European infrastructure firm was in Dubai in early March 2026 when the Strait of Hormuz closed. His company had booked him through to a site visit in Abu Dhabi. The office called their corporate travel insurer to understand evacuation coverage. The answer: war is excluded. So is conflict-related disruption. So is political violence. The engineer waited six days in a hotel, racking up costs his company later found they had to absorb entirely.

That situation - an employee stranded, costs mounting, insurer declining - is playing out for dozens of companies right now. And it will keep happening as long as corporate risk teams assume that booking comprehensive travel insurance means their people are covered.

They are not.

War is now a mainstream corporate risk

The numbers make this hard to ignore. According to the Allianz Risk Barometer 2026, political risks and violence climbed to number seven among global business risks - the highest position the category has ever held. War has overtaken civil unrest as the political violence exposure companies fear most, cited by 53% of respondents globally. Civil unrest sits at number two (49%). Terrorism and sabotage at number three (46%).

That is not a peripheral risk category anymore. That is the boardroom agenda.

What changed? Several things compounded at once. The conflicts in Europe and the Middle East - particularly the 2026 Iran war and the consequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz on 4 March - disrupted global trade flows and strained political alliances in ways that created new, unpredictable risk exposures for companies with people in the field. According to Allianz’s research, business assets experienced a 20% increase in conflict exposure over the last five years. The pipeline of geopolitical shocks that drove that exposure has not closed.

This is the operating environment you are sending people into. The question is whether your insurance covers the risk you are actually running.

What standard corporate travel insurance actually says

Pull out your corporate travel policy and look for the exclusions section. Most standard policies - whether booked through a corporate travel management company or a group insurance scheme - contain language that excludes claims arising from:

War, including declared and undeclared war
Armed conflict between nations or internal armed conflict
Civil war and insurrection
Acts of terrorism (sometimes with a carve-out for small-scale incidents, sometimes not)
Government-ordered evacuations or mandatory relocation

Some policies include a terrorism endorsement as an add-on. Few include war. Almost none include political violence in the broad sense - riots, civil commotion, politically motivated sabotage, or forced evacuation triggered by government advice rather than active firing.

This is not fine print. It is the core of the coverage gap. Your traveler in Jakarta during the August 2025 riots - which generated over $50 million in insured losses according to Allianz - or in Kathmandu during the September 2025 protests that could approach $200 million in insured losses: their standard policy likely declined to respond.

The “known event” trap

Once a conflict or unrest event is publicly reported, insurers often apply a “known event” exclusion retroactively. This means that even if you did not read the news that morning, any policy taken out after the event became public is void for claims arising from it.

Risk managers booking travel after the Strait of Hormuz closure began making the news found that new or renewed policies for Gulf region travel were either excluded or priced at war-risk premiums. The coverage gap hit the moment the conflict was known - not the moment the policy was written.

The three products your program should be using

Standard travel insurance is not worthless. It handles medical emergencies, trip cancellation, lost luggage, and routine disruption well. But for organizations sending people into elevated-risk environments, the risk architecture needs three additional layers.

1. Kidnap, ransom, and extortion (KRE) insurance

KRE coverage is specifically designed for K&R incidents and adjacent threats: express kidnap, tiger kidnapping, product tampering, and cyber extortion in some cases. It funds the ransom payment, consultant fees from specialist crisis response firms, and post-incident psychological support for the affected individual and their family.

KRE is not just for organizations operating in conflict zones. Express kidnapping - a short-duration, opportunistic abduction for an ATM withdrawal or immediate ransom - happens in major business destinations including Mexico City, Johannesburg, Lagos, and parts of South Asia. If your travel program includes these cities, KRE should be table stakes.

2. Political violence and civil unrest (PVCU) coverage

This is the specific coverage that responds where standard policies do not. PVCU covers losses - including personal injury, property damage, and business interruption - arising from riots, strikes, civil commotion, politically motivated acts, and sometimes war risk depending on the policy structure.

For an employee evacuated from a country following a government advisory, PVCU typically covers:

Emergency accommodation and repatriation costs
Loss of business equipment and personal property
Medical costs arising from civil disorder
Salary continuation for extended inability to work

The Indonesian and Nepal unrest events in 2025 were primarily PVCU losses. Companies with the coverage recovered. Companies relying on standard travel insurance absorbed the cost.

3. Terrorism insurance

Terrorism cover is often treated as the most niche of the three, but the risk profile has shifted. Terrorism and sabotage were cited by 46% of Allianz respondents as a top political violence risk. State-sponsored acts of sabotage - including against critical infrastructure, transport networks, and supply chains - have increased sharply in the last 18 months according to Allianz’s research.

For organizations with operations near potential strategic targets - energy infrastructure, ports, financial district office space, logistics hubs - terrorism insurance is no longer a luxury line item.

Malicious risk insurance: what it looks like in practice

The umbrella product that bundles KRE, PVCU, and terrorism coverage is commonly called malicious risk insurance. The exact bundling varies by insurer and market, but the principle is consistent: it covers the scenarios that fall outside the war and conflict exclusions of standard policies.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed, companies with malicious risk coverage had a defined escalation path. Their crisis response consultant was engaged within hours. Evacuation logistics were coordinated and funded. The engineer in Dubai would have been home, or at minimum covered, within 24-48 hours.

Good malicious risk programs also include:

24/7 crisis response access - not a call centre, but a trained responder with regional knowledge
Pre-deployment intelligence - briefings on destination-specific risk before travel is confirmed
Welfare check cadence for personnel in high-risk locations
Incident response coordination across the traveler, local security assets, and the corporate security team

That is not a passive insurance product. It is an active risk management tool.

How to audit your current coverage

Before your next travel approval for an elevated-risk destination, run through this checklist:

Pull the exclusions schedule from your current travel policy and confirm war, terrorism, and civil unrest exclusions
Map your destination risk against those exclusions - if any planned destinations fall under a government travel advisory with “do not travel” or “exercise high degree of caution” language, the standard policy is almost certainly inadequate
Check for KRE - if your travel program includes destinations in the top 20 kidnap risk countries (Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, South Africa - among others), standalone or embedded KRE coverage should be non-negotiable
Ask your insurer for a coverage opinion on your top five highest-risk destinations - in writing
Review your duty of care obligations under ISO 31030 and local employment law - coverage gaps may constitute a failure to take reasonable steps to protect personnel

Step five matters because duty of care liability does not stop at the insurance policy. If an employee is harmed in a conflict zone and your organization cannot demonstrate you had adequate coverage and a response plan, the legal exposure extends well beyond the uncovered claim.

What this means for your next risk committee meeting

The Allianz Risk Barometer data lands on a lot of risk committee agendas this year. The right response is not a policy memo about checking government advisories. It is a coverage review.

The questions your board and security leadership should be asking:

Do our current policies cover war, terrorism, and political violence?
Do we have a malicious risk program in place for our highest-risk destinations?
What is the maximum uninsured liability exposure if we have a traveler incident in a conflict-affected country?
Does our crisis response plan include access to specialist support, or are we relying on the travel desk to manage an evacuation?

If those questions do not have clear answers, the gap is worth closing before the next trip is approved, not after.

HAAVYN’s platform integrates real-time threat intelligence from over 1,200 sources across 220 countries with malicious risk insurance - including K&R, terrorism, political violence, and CBRN coverage - built directly into the traveler safety workflow. If you want to understand what your current program is missing, book a call with our team and we can walk through the coverage landscape for your specific destinations and risk profile.