Insurance, insurance, ye gods insurance.

WHAT a nightmare. Honestly, I think I aged several years trying to sort this out.

To be clear – insurance if one’s in the UK seems to be relatively simple, both in terms of medical insurance (through Campbell Irvine) and for cars.

Should you have the temerity, however, not to be UK resident, life becomes extremely unpleasant and complicated.

Here’s what I found, and here’s how I ended up getting us completely legally insured :)

Health insurance

This is a major one. The Rally’s a difficult and dangerous undertaking.  One’s at risk not only for terrible gastric distress requiring hospitals, but also malaria (Russia), crazed locals (everywhere), crazed Ralliers (particularly at borders), all kinds of food-borne diseases, and, most terrifying, accidents. Of the vehicular kind.

I contacted a LOT of people, and spent a bunch of time looking through forums, contacting other Ralliers, and everything. To no avail.

Something very important, for future Ralliers – you NEED to make sure insurers understand this is not a race. They will assume it is, and generally refuse to cover racing events.  Also, I figure lying in order to get coverage is a bad idea – if something does go wrong, your policy will be void, so it’s a pointless exercise. Also, one can get into trouble for insurance fraud…

World Nomads, before you say is, specifically EXCLUDES covering Ralliers. Many of other insurers said they could cover us if we got the runs and needed airlifting (for example), but the moment there was a medical problem involving a vehicle of any sort, we weren’t covered.  This was not, to my mind, acceptable, given that I figured accidents were our most likely kind of damage (and would probably be the worst, too).

Campbell Irvine wasn’t able to help us – as they can only do UK residents – but we were told by other non-UK Ralliers that the underwriters, Patriot Insurance, had covered them. When I contacted said underwriters, though, they said absolutely not, and that any insurance with them, for the purposes of the Rally, would not be valid (I immediately contacted the other team to warn them).

And insurance withe them would have cost on the order of a grand (NZ dollars), even if we had been able to get it…

Finally, after contacting all the companies I could find both here and overseas, including Canada!, something wonderful happened.

Dane came home and said he’d seen an ad on a bus for 1Cover, and had I tried them?

I said no, and we gave them a shout. Joy of joys, they said they’d totally cover us – FULL travel coverage, for medical expenses and stuff like stolen/lost things, etc. The cost? NZ $330 for the both of us, for the full six weeks. They were also friendly, and very responsive.

To sum up then, for our travel and medical insurance: 1Cover (a NZ/Australian company)

Car insurance

And then there was car insurance. Christ but the UK doesn’t make it easy…

The situation: I’m a UK citizen, though not currently resident there. We needed a car for the Rally, and so bought one, which was of course put into my name. On top of my NZ driver’s license I also had a UK license, although after much reading I discovered that it wasn’t valid because I wasn’t living at the address printed on the license. * facepalm *

Now, in the UK one HAS to have car insurance to be able to drive legally. Ditto the EU. However, finding a company who will offer insurance to a non-UK resident is almost impossible.  I tried DownUnder Insurance and got told to sod off. Even their summer holiday van policy, AIMED at NZ/Aussie residents coming into the country and wanting to pootle around in the UK and EU, was denied me. Yep, I could have lied and said I lived in the UK, given them an address and whatnot, but the same problem arises – if we have an accident, we’re not covered, and could also be in trouble for insurance fraud.

As for Hertz, who also offer something similar…well, we had to phone them to find out about their adventure insurance.  Upon saying I wanted UK and EU insurance, I got asked by a very unfriendly UK girl what was going to happen to the car after our holiday. When I told the truth – namely, that it was going to be sold in Mongolia, she said they couldn’t insure me. No reason, nothing.

So, those were the two primary insurers who were willing to consider non-UK residents, out.

Bastards.

And then I started to get lucky.

On a forum thread somewhere on the interwebs, I came across the name TourInsure. Based in Germany, this company specialises in providing insurance fro EU and non-EU residents.  Anyway, I got in contact and they were perfectly happy to insure us for our EU leg of the trip, in full knowledge that I was on a NZ license. They also didn’t charge extra for other drivers, or need them to be named, or anything. We were just…covered :) To the tune of about 200 Euros, admittedly, but still. And then it got even better: we realised that the 200 Euros wouldn’t only be for the couple of days we’d be spending driving through Europe, but also covered us through all of our other countries except Mongolia. So, that’s Eastern Europe, the Baltics, and Russia.  It didn’t cover theft, admittedly, but it DID cover third party, which is what we wanted. Given that we’d been told car insurance in each country after Europe would probably cost $50+, this was a bargain!

However, it still left the UK. Grrrrrrrr. I still don’t understand why these people make it so bloody impossible to try and keep the law there. Honestly.

Anyway, I eventually found a legal loophole. An insurer called autonet insurance are willing to insure certain non-UK license holders for short term insurance.  Now, things got complicated if we wanted EU car insurance from them, but we didn’t.  We just wanted UK insurance, and they were able to give it to us (for something like 100 squids for 4 days, the greedy buggers, but still).

Of course, things got fun when it turned out that their database had incorrect details for our jimny – given that things work off license plate numbers, this seemed weird, but I was then told by them that because their database was wrong, our insurance wasn’t valid. Sigh. However, a separate conversation with their underwriters, Aviva, overturned this, as Aviva said the precise car model details didn’t matter. Thank god, as it was our only shot, short of lying.

So, to sum up: autonet short term insurance for the UK, and TourInsure for EU, Eastern Europe, Baltics and Russia.

As for Mongolia – the insurance booth was closed when we finally got through the border, and we weren’t able to figure out how to get insurance once inside the country, so we risked that one. Given how hectic the roads are, and how insane UB’s traffic is, I think it’s a mixture of skill and luck we were OK. It’s also why we gave our car to the organisers as quickly as we could when we got to UB :)

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Thanks again to the Marvellous Tony Preece, for his help :)