The Hong Kong protests of 2019, the Sri Lanka uprising of 2022, the Iran protests of 2022–23, the Ecuador security crisis of 2024, Bangladesh in 2024, Kenya in 2024 and the 2025 Indonesia protests are all cases where overseas travellers were caught in something they hadn't expected, sometimes for days. The lessons travel between them.

This is the playbook we wrote for our own staff before sending anyone to a country with active protest activity. It assumes you are a foreign visitor without local language skills, without local contacts, without local citizenship. If any of those don't apply, your options are wider.

Step 1 – Know which kind of unrest you're in

Three categories matter:

Permitted protest. Has a route, an organising body, a public time window, and visible police coordinating rather than confronting. Risk to foreign travellers is low. Common in most democracies; the typical Saturday in Paris.

Tolerated but unsanctioned protest. Authorities haven't approved it but aren't actively breaking it up. Often the crowd is large enough that suppression isn't practical. Risk is medium – tear gas is possible, rubber bullets are possible, the crowd can move quickly. Common in Hong Kong (2019), Bangkok periodically, Buenos Aires.

Active confrontation or insurrection. Police firing live rounds, military deployment, declared state of emergency, parts of the city no-go. This is what people generally mean by "civil unrest" when they're worried about it. Treat as a fast-moving emergency.

You usually have enough information to classify within fifteen minutes of arriving in the country: hotel staff know, the local press knows, the embassy's website knows, the Warnely live incident wire knows.

Step 2 – Move yourself out of the affected area

Most foreign travellers caught in serious unrest are caught because they walked towards it. Whether out of curiosity, because their hotel was central, or because they didn't know.

The first move once you have classified the situation as category 2 or 3 is to get to a hotel that is not in the protest's geographical centre. In most cities this means moving from the central business district outwards to a quieter residential suburb or the airport hotels. Five kilometres is usually enough.

This isn't fleeing. You can still see the city, eat, do the things you came to do. You just want your bed to be somewhere that doesn't have water cannon parked outside.

Practical detail: book a refundable rate at a backup hotel in a quieter area before you need it. £300 of held-but-refundable hotel bookings is the cheapest unrest insurance available. You can cancel if the situation calms.

Step 3 – Register with your embassy

The UK has LOCATE. The US has STEP (Smart Traveler Enrollment Program). Most other countries have equivalents. Register the moment you decide unrest is category 2 or 3.

Registering does three things. It puts you on the embassy's distribution list for evacuation guidance. It gives them a phone number to call you on. And it logs that you are in-country, which matters if a family member calls them frantic three days from now.

Registration does not, and never has, meant that the embassy will personally evacuate you. Embassies coordinate; they very rarely transport. The realistic expectation is that they will tell you where to go, what flights are leaving, and which routes are blocked. The actual moving is on you. We have written more about this in What an Embassy Can and Cannot Do for You Abroad.

Step 4 – Switch your information sources

Local language reporting in unrest situations is often days ahead of English-language coverage. If you don't speak the language, find an English-speaking local who does and ask them to summarise what state media and opposition outlets are saying. Hotel concierges in major cities will usually do this. Drivers from major ride-hailing apps will sometimes.

Twitter/X-equivalent platforms are useful but unreliable. Verified journalists from established outlets are the gold standard – BBC, Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, France 24. Treat anonymous accounts with suspicion in all directions.

The single most useful piece of information is curfew times. Curfews are usually announced through the day and start at evening. Knowing the exact start time, the curfew area, and whether foreigners are exempt (sometimes yes, sometimes no) determines what you can do that evening.

Subscribe to the country's advisory changes feed – Warnely has a per-country RSS for every country we cover, and the FCDO/State updates appear there.

Step 5 – Plan a route out

By this point you should have:

The fifth piece is a planned exit. This doesn't mean booking a flight tonight. It means knowing:

If unrest worsens overnight, you want to be a decision and an Uber away from a flight, not five hours from sorting transport. The 2022 Sri Lanka evacuation moved most foreign travellers out of the country within 48 hours because Bandaranaike Airport stayed open. The 2024 Bangladesh evacuation was different because Hazrat Shahjalal closed for a week.

If your home country has chartered evacuation flights – the FCDO did this from Sudan in 2023 – you register through the embassy. Allocation is usually based on vulnerability (medical conditions, children, elderly) rather than registration order, but registration is what makes you visible to the allocation.

Step 6 – Decide whether to stay or go

The hardest call in unrest is when "stay calm and ride it out" is right and when "leave now" is right. Three indicators that push towards leaving:

Internet shutdowns. Most authoritarian responses to unrest start with throttling or shutting down mobile data. The Iran 2022 shutdown was the textbook case. Once the internet goes, you lose information, banking apps, ride-hailing, communications, and your embassy's web pages. If the internet goes down and won't recover within hours, leave.

Airport disruption. If commercial flights start cancelling for non-weather reasons, leave on the next one. Airport closures rarely give twenty-four hours' notice.

Currency or banking restrictions. When governments restrict ATM withdrawals or freeze foreign-card transactions, the next move is usually further restriction on movement.

Three indicators that argue for staying put:

Hotel staff are still going home each evening. It's an extremely reliable local signal. If the receptionist is doing a normal commute home, the city is not falling apart.

The embassy hasn't moved to evacuate its own staff. Embassies cut non-essential staff before they cut anything else. If the British Embassy is still fully staffed, the FCDO judgement is that the country is not at evacuation point.

Routine commerce is open within 1 km of your hotel. Pharmacies, food shops, banks. If they're open, the city is functioning.

What your insurance actually covers

Most travel policies have an exclusion for "war, invasion, or insurrection", read broadly. In practice this means:

The cancellation cover is the bigger question. Many policies will pay out if your trip is cancelled because the FCDO upgrades advice to "advises against all but essential" before your departure date. They will not pay if the advice was already at that level when you booked.

Read your policy schedule. We've written more about the specific clauses in Travel insurance traps: 6 reasons claims get denied.

See also