I've been looking at companies who provide exped insurance, specifically to some of the more remote areas of the world.
Amex have now excluded this type of caving as an option so I looked at Snowcard as an alternative.

From their website:

"Multi sport ? extreme adventure

Down hill MTB (i.e. off tracks and trails), graded white water kayaking, alpine mountaineering, ice climbing, designated trekking peaks up to 6500m, exploratory pot holing and caving in remote areas (where any rescue would be self organised by expedition members)"

The question is if any rescue would be self organised by expedition members why not just get a simple (and much cheaper) trekker/tourist type of insurance instead, ie. the type of insurance that sorts you out medically and/or flys you home if you have an accident on an organised tour.  The expedition members carry out the underground rescue part and the insurance takes over to cover the cost of surface evacuation and associated bills.

It seems that insurance companies are taking our money and letting us do the work.  Does any one have experience/proper understanding of this or am I just talking out the back of my head!

Cassidy said:

I've been looking at companies who provide exped insurance, specifically to some of the more remote areas of the world.
Amex have now excluded this type of caving as an option so I looked at Snowcard as an alternative.

From their website:

"Multi sport ? extreme adventure

Down hill MTB (i.e. off tracks and trails), graded white water kayaking, alpine mountaineering, ice climbing, designated trekking peaks up to 6500m, exploratory pot holing and caving in remote areas (where any rescue would be self organised by expedition members)"

The question is if any rescue would be self organised by expedition members why not just get a simple (and much cheaper) trekker/tourist type of insurance instead, ie. the type of insurance that sorts you out medically and/or flys you home if you have an accident on an organised tour.  The expedition members carry out the underground rescue part and the insurance takes over to cover the cost of surface evacuation and associated bills.

It seems that insurance companies are taking our money and letting us do the work.  Does any one have experience/proper understanding of this or am I just talking out the back of my head!

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The first instinct of any insurance company is find an opt out that avoids paying....  So, Mr Smith, you are claiming for helicopter evacuation from Mount Flintstone, medical expenses and repatatriation.  What was the cause of the injury Mr Smith?  Caving? Sorry that is excluded.  We aren't paying.

Depending where you are going you will still be looking at similar evacuation to the other named activities.

Have you also tried the BMC?

Mike

(some one beat me to it!)


Imagine the scenario

"Hello - Random Insurance Claims line,,,,, how can I help"

"Hi - yes - I need assistance, we have a guy here, who needs heli evac from a hill in Afbekiturkstan to the nearest city, and then emergency flight back to the UK for urgent brain surgery"

"OK - fine, let me take some details.  Blah Blah Blah ....How did the accident occur.?? "

" He was down a cave exploring when..."

"Can I stop you there... you weren't covered for caving, Good bye  -  Click".

They are slippery feckers and avoid large payouts at all costs.

We had huge debates about this in the Eldon prior to going to Albania on exped in 2010.  Some members had long and involved conversations with the likes of Snowcard.

Upshot was (in 2010) that Snowcard wouldn't insure us, see quote from the time..

I had a long exchange with SnowCard and in the end they said no. I even offered a notarised letter excluding the recovery from subsurface. It started when I was checking that Albania was not an exclusion, some companies used to exclude Albania from the European cover as they still do with some countries. Political Europe is very different from Geographical Europe. In the end they said that if I was going underground and it had been explored then OK but if it was new then it was not covered. I even established that SnowCard would actually be no good to me at home either as the majority of what I do is exploratory caving

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however, Towergate (PJHayman) would
Quote from an email at the time

I am using Towergate {( Adventure category 4 ) it is in fact P. J. Hayman }, Have emails from Richard Gibb of Towergate confirming that exploratory caving is covered, however they are just an intermediary and the policy comes from P. J. Hayman

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I remember going directly with PJ Hayman and cutting out the middle man (Towergate) saved me few quid.

Some of the Guys who went this year did go with Snowcard though...

"Snowcard replied to say that our trip would be covered under their single trip LEISURE ACTIVITIES HIGH RISK CAVING policy cover. If you want to see the email that I sent and their reply let me know. I'm going to go with them."

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For peace of mind, i'd rather go on exped with some sort of applicable cover, and worry about it when and if they start arguing after the event.

One thing to think about is if the expedition has enough experienced manpower to fully carry out a self rescue, or if there is any need to fly people out to help. This certainly isn't unheard of, Mexico 2004 quite a few people were flooded in and had to be dived out. There we no divers in Mexico at the time that were experienced enough to carry out such a rescue, so two divers from the UK were flown out to carry out the rescue.

Without adequate expedition level insurance this would of never of been covered and the expedition members would of had to of forked out for the flights, expenses and loss of earning for the rescuers to come over.

Also as Andy has pointed out, insurance companies will do as much as they can to avoid paying, especially if its something expensive like a heli evac. Even if the rescue didn't involve the actual cave rescue, because the expedition covered that, they would probably refuse to cover the fell evacuation because the injury was caused by something not covered.

Have a look at dogtag, I know quite a few people that have got insurance for caving expeditions through them for substantially cheaper than snowcard!

I think in most European countries the cave rescue itself  (underground part) is covered by 'Speleo Secours / Cave Rescue'. So if your organisation (in my case VVS - Flemish cave organisation) has an agreement with speleo secours then that part is already covered. In my case even the transport from the entry of the cave towards the nearby hospital is also covered by this insurance.
So before you go on expedition you should check if your covered or not in that country.

But the repatriation from the hospital to home is not. So for that part I have my own repatriation insturance. But check that on beforehand because not all Repatriation insurances cover Speleo accidents. In my case I had to ask a special agreement to be covered. It was granted because the rescue itself and the repatriation to the hospital was covered by my caving insurance.

We had an accident af few years back during our summer expedition on the PSM. And the resecue was fully covered. And it was a large scale rescue.

BR

Dagobert L'Ecluse (SC Avalon)

When 3 of us went to Montenegro last year we were pretty keen to have insurance with the lack of manpower. We went with Dogtag who were really quite cheap (can't remember exactly how much off the top of my head) and we had conversations along the lines of, "If I'm injured down a cave that noone else has been in before, you'll cover getting the relevant people to come and get me out?", to make sure they definitely did cover it!

Hmm I thought until recently Dogtag did not cover expedition caving? I know I did not go with them last year due to that. They also seemed to seperate caving from potholing. Potholing was on thier extreame price bracket where as caving was in thier sport price bracket.

I e-mailed them about this saying that the two were the same thing. I guess a few others did too because when I last looked they are now both in the cheaper sport bracket, yay!

have you read http://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=11348.0 - we didn't go for dogtag because of their response re expedition caving when we went to Montenegro earlier this year, we went with Snowcard instead because they gave us much more confidence we'd be covered if something did go wrong.

there does seem to be a hell of a lot of variation with regards to what insurance companys will cover ive had conversations with the same insurers (dog tag, snowcard and tower gate all on at least two ocaasions) and had totaly different responses on every ocasion as to weather or not they will cover expedition caving. I think a lot of insurence companys simply dont know what risks the different asspects of the sport entail and it all often depends on who you speak to when you ring the company up... 

I know that the director of Snowcard knows exactly what risks need to be covered.

If there is a rescue team available in the region then generally the actual rescue will be free. If there is no team then there is likely to be great expense, as all the necessary equipment and personell will need to be flown out and generally to a remote location. Although the members of the expedition are going to be the rescue team, it is likely that anything serious will need much more man power and resources than the average expedition will have.

Les,  that may well be the case but given some of the locations of the caves being explored on expeditions these days, flying in a fully mobilised and ready to hit the ground running rescue team (that could do any good) could well be an impossible task.

Trips that involve several days approach in the Jungle are a good case.

So that still poses the question as to why take out expensive "exploratory cave" insurance.  A person with a broken leg on a hillside is still a person with a broken leg on a hillside whether they have (expensive) exploratory cave insurance or (cheaper) trekking insurance.

Is it just a case of the insurance companies wanting some extra cash in a situation were they may not be in a position to offer anything useful.  I did say "may not be in a position" as there are always scenarios that prove the exception.  However, in the majority of probable cases, self rescue without the need for insurance backed aid will almost certainly be the norm.

But it's not about the norm.
Insurance is effectively book making. The insurers want to cover the worst risk so spread the cost over a whole section of their customer base.
You are right that most rescues will be quite a low claim for the insurer but the big one still has to be paid for.
It is fair(er) if the risk is distributed amongst the groups that pose the biggest potential claim, therefore the expedition risk is spread over all the expeditions, the tourist risk is spread over the tourists. Skiers are charged by the week as an extra risk so you don't pay for all those broken legs and medevacs from the piste on your exped insurance, nor do they pay for your risk.

With insurance companies its all about balancing the books, so long as they dont have to lose out themselves. At least with somebody like Snowcard they seem to try and share the risks fairly (or as fairly as is sensible).

The price also depends on how well understood the risk is. If lots of people do an activity the insurers have a good set of statistics on which to base their pricing. Expeditionary caving does not have a well developed actuarial basis. It's not just about having a broken leg, it's about the chance of breaking a leg treking vs. breaking a leg caving. After a self rescue you may be a "person with a broken leg on a hillside" but was the chance of breaking a leg higher in a cave than whilst treking?

Big Jim got Dogtag to include expedition potholing and they updated their website to include it before we went to Albania earlier this year

Just a note to add to this that I have just tried to contact Richard Gibb at Towergate to get a quote for our trip to Thailand this year and have been informed that he has left the company.  I'm just in the process of finding out if they are still able to quote for expedition caving or not.

cavegirl99 said:

Just a note to add to this that I have just tried to contact Richard Gibb at Towergate

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Please note that at the moment BCA are not endorsing Towergate, or anyone else's policy for that matter, because of specific concerns about Towergate's policy covering self rescue. I know Nick Williams has done some work on trying to find a policy we are able to endorse, and the results of some of his e-mail exchanges have been posted here somewhere from what I remember.