Travel Insured International

I bought policy that covered the cost for an African Safari Tour group in September 2014. If I cancel the tour, I will incur a cancellation penalty of 20% pp if done by 2 days in advance of tour start. Now that Ebola is a real concern there, I am thinking of cancelling. I did not insure my flights or outside the tour hotels with Travel Insured . Will they balk at paying because I didn't insure 100% of everything, even though I insured the full cost of the tour? I did pay extra for CFAR.

Kathy

Are you considering using the CFAR? If so, you are likely out of luck. Most trip insurance CFAR policies require you to insure ALL the prepaid non refundable costs. If you didn't insure everything, you probably wasted the extra premium you paid for the CFAR option because you wouldn't be eligible for CFAR reimbursement.

Read the fine print in your policy to know for sure.

That's what I was afraid of. Since the tour trip is 80% refundable, and airfare can be re-booked with a penalty, and I haven't paid for any of the hotels yet, I was hoping that would fall under the full cost of the tour itself that I insured.

kathy

Where does the Safari go? For all the press about it, it's been completely confined to a few countries on the Western Coast and a tiny handful in Lagos traced to a single person.

Assuming your Safari is in, say, Kenya (on the other side of Africa), I would not hesitate to go if it were me. Africa's a big place, and this disease isn't like the flu or noro, where one guy could give it to half the plane.

As far as the CFAR rider goes... you'll just have to read it. A quick check online didn't reveal the terms. But I will say that if it does have a "100% clause"... all non-refundable means just that, all non-refundable. It means the entire tour charge, the entire plane ticket, pre-paid non-refundable hotels, etc. Basically, the absolute maximum claim you could ever file. (i.e., if you were gravely ill, you might file a claim for the whole plane ticket instead of just the change fee.)

If you don't have a "100% clause" then you can just file the claim and collect your benefit.

It's an interesting question, and you should check with TravelInsured OR with the agency you purchased the policy from (like TripInsuranceStore.com or InsureMyTrip, etc.).

It is POSSIBLE - this is the thing to ask - that ONLY the non-refundable change fee needed to be insured.

IF you can apply most of the airfare to another ticket in the future, then the insurance probably wouldn't have paid you for that "retained value" anyway.

It's worth asking.

Because TravelInsured bumps up the coverage amount to the next highest $500 (or something similar, *usually* - but check YOUR policy!), then MAYBE the modest "change fee" would already fit in...??

Also, is that "20% if you cancel more than 2 days in advance" from the Tour Company or TravelInsured? It wasn't quite clear from what you wrote.

(I thought most of the TravelInsured CFAR policies would reimburse 75% of the costs, not 80% - but I could very easily be wrong about that. We obviously focus on the policies that we actually purchase, and not "all of the possible policies".)

Good luck.

GeezerCouple

Also consider that you can update your policy now with additional non-refundable costs. We did that in May, about 3 weeks before a trip, when we added a couple of tours that we pre-booked and our hotel.