The trouble with travelling Risk takers: Between 30 and 40 per cent of Australians travel overseas without any travel insurance at all. In mid-January last year, 26-year-old Sydney man Lee Hudswell died after jumping from a makeshift wooden tower into the Nam Song River, in the backpacker town of Vang Vieng in central Laos. It was dry season and the river was low. Witnesses say he struck his head on a rock, dying that afternoon in the local hospital having never regained consciousness. The remote town, once a quiet agricultural village, had burgeoned into party central in the space of a few years, with a proliferation of riverside bars and dance-floors pumping out trance music day and night, dirt-cheap alcohol and the euphemistically-named "happy shakes" on sale to young Westerners wanting to let their hair down. A fortnight later another young Australian, aged 19, perished along the river in similar circumstances while a third, aged 22, was found dead in a hotel room in the ancient Laotian temple town of Luang Prabang not long afterwards. Never regained consciousness: Lee Hudswell. These three were among 904 Australians who died overseas last year, and their youth highlights a key trend identified in a report this week from the Lowy Institute. Written by former lawyer Alex Oliver, it draws attention to a soaring workload for the consular staff of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as more Australians, including travellers who are younger or older than those of previous decades, take advantage of cheap airfares and a strong dollar to flock overseas. Australians made 8.5 million trips overseas last year, and among those travelling were more than double the number of under-25s , and triple the number of over-55s, compared with a decade ago. "The profile of the typical Australian traveller has changed," Oliver writes, "as have their destinations and the activities they pursue abroad - all of which has significantly expanded the consular workload." Older travellers, she pointed out, were more likely to face health problems while inexperienced younger travellers, seeking adventure and thrills, were more accident-prone and more likely to land in legal or financial strife. Travel insurance provider Cover-More is acutely aware of the trends. Its marketing and strategy manager, Zac Brookes, said 30 per cent of the medical claims it handled for under-25s last year were for injury, compared with 20 per cent for the over-55s. But hospital stays for the over-55s tended to be three times longer than for the younger group. "The fact is that international travel has become available, accessible and palatable to young Australians," says Dr Tony Gherardin, national medical adviser to the Travel Doctor. You've got things now like schoolies week being done overseas, those sorts of rites of passage like gap year, and people can't assume that going overseas carries no extra risks. Paula Ganly, DFAT's deputy chief of consular policy, says the department is trying to sharpen its use of social media to reach youngsters, many of whom are heading overseas for the first time. "They go over there and don't realise how different things can be," she says. They don't realise, for instance, that if you go to Thailand or Bali, and you are not asked for your motorbike licence, it doesn't mean you don't need one. That can void your insurance if you have an accident. Ganly also warns that people who take the cheapest airfare and accommodation package often don't allow for the best-laid plans to go wrong. "If you don't have any fat in the budget, then you really can't afford to get on that plane," she says. DFAT last year gave $10,000 to the Red Frogs chaplaincy service, which helps youths prepare for "schoolies" at the end of year 12, to drive home the insurance message and encourage younger travellers to consult its Smartraveller website. Figures compiled by DFAT show Thailand, the Philippines, Greece, Vietnam, the US and Indonesia were, in order, the places where most Australians died last year. New Zealand was most visited by Australians - collectively we made 1.2 million trips there - but ranked among the lowest for deaths, with only eight. Thailand, by contrast, had 111 Australian deaths for 672,000 visits but Ganly says many of the deceased there and in the Philippines (where 68 died) were older Australians who had moved for budgetary reasons. Some were terminally ill or disabled, and were seeking cheaper care, she says. There was a similar picture for Greece, where 60 Australians died. Both Oliver and Ganly say the expectations of Australians who get into trouble overseas were greater than they used to be. "There is definitely a growing sense of entitlement" Ganly says. When you think back to the 1960s, '70s and '80s, people often backpacked around the world, faced all these issues, and resolved them as they went along. But now, with [traditional and social] media raising the profile of cases ... surprisingly, you will get parents ringing up about a son in his 30s, saying 'this has happened to him, what are you going to do about it?"' According to Oliver, DFAT staff have had requests as banal as "will the sand in Egypt upset my asthma?" and "could DFAT feed my dogs while I'm away?" She is critical of politicians for buying into high-profile consular cases such as the Bali boy affair of 2011, when then foreign minister Kevin Rudd and Prime Minister Julia Gillard vied for honours over who'd done most to help a 14-year old boy arrested for buying drugs on the street. This level of political attention, she says, feeds exaggerated notions of what governments do for citizens in strife abroad. Officials working in Britain, Canada and New Zealand have reported similar trends. Oliver is worried about how DFAT will handle the growing burden of its consular work given recent belt-tightening, and has suggested a small consular levy on passports, or airline tickets - a suggestion rejected by industry body the Tourism and Transport Forum on Wednesday. But Oliver argues a levy as low as the price of a cup of coffee at the airport would be a shot in the arm for the consular services budget. Meanwhile, the message from DFAT and the travel medicine specialists is insure, and insure appropriately. Between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of Australians still go overseas without any travel cover at all.