Changes to our Travel Insurance in Afghanistan
When we first started looking at running tours of Afghanistan in early 2022 one of the main barriers was the lack of suitable travel insurance for our fellow travellers.
Few insurers were able to cover Afghanistan, mainly due to the sanctions implemented by the international community against the Taliban excluding Afghanistan from the international banking system. We tried talking to a number of specialist insurance brokers dealing with high risk travel and several insurers who typically work insuring journalists in hostile environments. Most declined to offer cover.
The solution we settled on was offering insurance to our travellers as part of our package via hotspotcover.com who offered us a comprehensive insurance package including crisis management by a well known third party security company. Most importantly for us it meant that in the event of an emergency that all our group were insured under the same policy which would make coordination of a medical evacuation considerably easier and communication with a single insurer straight forward.
The scheme worked well and satisfied us that in combination with our risk assessment, which contains a list of the best possible available medical facilities in Afghanistan and our relationship with a network of Afghan hospitals that we would provide the best level of medical and evacuation care for any of our travellers who found themselves in need of help.
This approach came at a cost of nearly $1000USD per traveller, but also put us at risk of being considered an insurance intermediary or reseller. We aren’t an insurance company, nor want to be one and by selling insurance as part of our trips we might be considered one.
We decided to take this risk on and relied on the goodwill of our customers to understand what we were trying to achieve – a friendly lawyer advised us that goodwill might not be worth much if the insurance company we had bought cover for on behalf of our travellers declined to pay out for a medical evacuation for a group of 8 from Afghanistan!
As the slow drip of travellers visiting Afghanistan has become a gentle trickle, more and more insurance companies have started to offer cover for the country, some at a far cheaper cost than we were being offered. This started to make our trips look very expensive and a number of our customers started to enquire whether they could cover themselves with their own insurance policies.
We have therefore come to the difficult decision to remove our insurance cover from our trips and require our travellers to provide us evidence of their own travel insurance policy digitally BEFORE travelling. Guests will also be required to provide the group leader with a hard printed copy of their insurance documents upon arrival in Afghanistan.
As an example, residents of the UK are able to get suitable cover from High Risk Voyager for around $200USD for a 10 day trip to Afghanistan.
Travellers on our trips are required to have a minimum of $300,000 USD cover for medical emergencies and an additional $300,000 USD cover for emergency evacuation. For more information about out insurance requirements, please have a look at out our latest terms and conditions.