Travel
Travel insurance covers what your local policies stop covering the moment you leave the country: emergency medical, evacuation, cancellation, lost baggage, and liability while you're abroad. If you travel often, an annual policy usually costs less than buying cover trip by trip.
We arrange travel cover for single trips, annual policies, and corporate schemes, and we handle the claim when something goes wrong far from home.
Cover
What this typically covers
Emergency medical
Treatment abroad, and getting you home if you cannot fly commercially. It is the reason to buy the policy at all, and everything else on this page is small beside it.
Overseas treatment, hospital stays, and emergency evacuation or repatriation home. This is by far the biggest bill you can run up abroad.
Trip cancellation & curtailment
The deposits, flights and bookings you cannot recover when a trip falls through for one of the listed reasons. Buy it when you book rather than when you pack, because the risk starts the moment you have paid for something.
Money you can't get back when a trip is cancelled or cut short for a covered reason.
Baggage & personal effects
Bags that do not arrive, or do not arrive intact. The delayed-baggage benefit is the one people use most, and it runs on the receipts for what you had to buy while you waited.
Lost, stolen, or damaged luggage, plus cover for the essentials while your bags are delayed.
Travel delay
There is a threshold in hours before this starts paying, and it is longer than the delay that ruins your day. Past it, this covers the wait and the way around it.
Payouts for long delays and missed connections, plus the cost of alternative transport.
Personal liability abroad
You hurt someone or damage their property somewhere your household policy does not reach, in a legal system that can cost far more than ours does.
Third-party cover if you accidentally injure someone or damage property while travelling.
Annual multi-trip
One policy, unlimited trips inside the year. Past two or three trips it costs less than buying single-trip cover each time, and you stop forgetting to buy it.
As many trips as you like in a year under one policy. Once you travel more than twice a year, it usually beats buying single-trip cover each time.
Limits
What this will not cover
Undeclared medical history
A condition you are already being treated for has to be declared and accepted. This is the exclusion behind most large declined travel claims, and the large claims are the medical ones.
Alcohol, and what follows it
Injury and loss while intoxicated is excluded almost everywhere, and it takes a surprising number of ordinary holiday accidents with it.
Leaving it unattended
A bag on the beach, a phone on a cafe table, a laptop in a hire car. Unattended property is excluded or severely limited, and it is how most holiday belongings are lost.
Cover bought after the fact
A policy taken out once the storm has a name, the airline has failed, or you already feel unwell answers for none of it. The cover has to predate the reason for claiming.
Claim
When you claim
Cancellation starts before you leave
The moment something happens that could stop the trip, cancel the bookings that day and tell us. Cover responds to what cannot be recovered, and every day of delay is more of it that becomes unrecoverable.
Abroad, the assistance line comes first
Serious treatment is authorised in advance rather than reimbursed afterwards, and the 24-hour line is what arranges direct settlement with a hospital. Declare pre-existing conditions before you travel, because that is the exclusion these claims turn on.
Baggage needs the carrier, not just the insurer
Lost or damaged baggage is reported to the airline before you leave the terminal, and the property irregularity report is what the claim is built on. Theft anywhere else needs a local police report, obtained where it happened.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Credit-card cover is usually thin: low medical limits, a long list of excluded activities, and not much on cancellation. Fine as a backup, rarely enough on its own, especially for overseas trips or anything adventurous.
Pre-existing conditions you didn't declare, high-risk activities you didn't list (extreme sports, motor racing), travel against an official advisory, and anything that happened while you were under the influence. Read the exclusions before you go.
Travel twice a year or more and annual cover is almost always cheaper, and it picks up unplanned trips automatically. For one big trip a year, a single-trip policy sized to that journey is usually better value.
If you're seriously ill or hurt abroad, an air-ambulance evacuation can run to hundreds of thousands of rand. It's the most important line on a travel policy, and for a lot of people it's the whole reason to buy one.
Call the policy's 24/7 assistance line first, not us. They authorise treatment, arrange evacuation, and deal with the local hospital. We pick up the paperwork once you're home.