Safari Tips -- Trip Insurance

You're all excited now, your deposit has been sent and you have your finalized itinerary.  The safari planner has probably sent your confirmation for all your chosen accommodations and activities.  You think you can rest easy until it's time to book airfare.  But hold one for one second.  There's one more thing to consider:  trip insurance.

There are people who never buy trip insurance because they feel like it's money out the window.  Ordinarily I might agree with them, but the cash outlay in advance of your arrival is significant; almost everything has to be paid up front before you go (ordinarily).  This can be in the thousands of dollars (or currency of your choice).  And things can go wrong, and sometimes do.  Do you really want to lose all that money?

Things trip insurance can cover:

• Your illness or a death that prevents you from being able to travel (or that of your travel companion or close family member)
• Work-related reasons for being unable to travel
• Trip delays or cancellations due to other parties
• Financial default of any of the providers of your trip
• Medical evacuation insurance
• Accident insurance

What I'd suggest is visiting InsureMyTrip and inputting your details. The site will comb through many commonly provided policies that you can compare.  Read the fine details.  All of them.  Some things you think should be covered may not be, or you may need to jump through certain hoops to document them.  Call the insurance companies if you have any questions.  Get all the information you need to make the decision.

Here's the thing, you want to do this as soon as you put your deposit down, because most of the time pre-existing conditions (for you, your traveling companion and anyone you may have to cancel a trip for if they need you to stay home) are only covered if you get insurance within the first 10-14 days of your deposit.  It depends on the plan and the insurance company, but this is what I usually experience.  What this will allow you is if a family member has a flare-up of a chronic condition that requires hospitalization and you being at home with them, that chronic condition could be covered as a pre-existing condition.  If you wait to insure your trip beyond that initial time period, this may not be covered.

One tip:  check with whomever you booked your safari.  Some safari planners have arrangements with certain insurance companies and will give you their provider code to book the insurance.  I have done this twice and had "gold-level" insurance coverage for the price of what "bronze-level" would have cost me on my own.  Sure, I didn't need it but....  The other benefit to booking the insurance through your planner is if something goes wrong with your safari, they can intervene on your behalf and rebook things according to your coverage limits.  A friend of mine missed a connecting flight, let her safari planner know, and he rebooked everything while she was finally en route to the safari destination.  When she landed, all was fixed for her and covered by the trip insurance.  There's something to be said for that level of convenience.

One last tip:  you don't need to include airfare in your initially insured amount.  If you just want to insure the itinerary price excluding airfare now, you can amend your policy whenever you get around to booking the airfare with a quick call to the insurance company.

Buying insurance or not is certainly a personal choice.  It's all a matter of how risk averse you are.  I feel that safari is different from just about any other travel that I do, in that I've invested so much more up front so I have more to lose if I can't go for a covered reason.  It's not like flying to Paris, where I may have only booked and paid for airfare but all my other costs would be out of pocket once I'm there.