Yes, travel insurance is worth carrying for a resort trip to Sanya, and the honest case here has less to do with the city's polished beach-front feel than with two real factors: a genuine typhoon season and the watersports that fill most visitors' itineraries. Sanya sits on the southern tip of Hainan Island, and both of those risks are tied directly to that tropical setting. Even a purely relaxed beach stay benefits from routine medical and trip-delay cover, since flight schedules into Hainan can shift with weather more than visitors expect.
Diving, jet-skiing, parasailing, and banana-boat rides around Yalong Bay and Dadonghai are the main draws for most visitors, and all of them carry real injury risk that a generic travel policy sometimes underinsures - equipment damage, watercraft collisions, and dive-depth limits are common gaps. Confirm your policy names watersports specifically and check any depth or activity cap before booking an excursion through your resort.
Sanya has modern hospitals aimed at tourists for routine care, but anything genuinely serious is typically stabilized locally and then referred either to Haikou, Hainan's capital and larger medical center, or in more complex cases onward to mainland hubs such as Guangzhou. Confirm your policy covers treatment and transfer between Chinese cities rather than assuming a resort clinic can handle a serious case on its own, and check whether it settles directly with a hospital or expects you to pay first and claim afterward.
Typhoon season across the South China Sea runs roughly June through November, and storms can disrupt flights, close beaches, and cancel watersports bookings with little notice; trip-delay and cancellation cover is worth checking closely if your visit falls in this window. Keep any clinic paperwork, excursion-operator incident reports, and receipts for treatment or cancelled activities, and check whether your existing health cover extends abroad and specifically to China before you assume it does.