Covid19 travel insurance for Costa Rica

Travel insurance in times of COVID19

Travel to Costa Rica

Lovely Costa Rica was a country to quickly open up their borders to tourists and many have flocked to their fascinating jungles and sandy beaches to get some respite from the daily grind. In part, this is due to the careful screening that the Costa Rican government is doing of travelers going into their country.

They require that each non-Costa Rican have travel medical insurance that includes: (1) at least $50,000 coverage for unexpected medical expenses AND (2) $2000 benefit for accommodation should a person be found positive for COVID-19 and have to quarantine for 14 days. The second requirement is difficult to find. However, travelers do have some options.

One option is to purchase one of the two plans offered by Costa Rica. The other option is to get a plan from Trawick International. Which plan you need depends upon where you reside. If you reside in the US, then you need to purchase the Safe Travels Voyager plan. If you reside outside the US, then you can purchase Safe Travels International. I will discuss all these options below.

The Safe Travels Voyager plan is a trip cancellation plan. Costa Rica does not care whether you insure your trip or not. If you enter $500 or less for "trip cost", this will give you the lowest possible cost of the insurance.

However, you can take advantage of the cancellation coverage if you want to insure the value of your trip (that is, what you will lose should you have to cancel before you leave on your trip). In that case, should you not be able to go on your trip for a set reason, such as: illness, death in the family, jury duty, etc, you will get 100% of the non-reimbursable portion of your trip (you will have to show documentation of your loss). If you want more generous cancellation coverage, you can add a "Cancel for Any Reason" rider to your policy (not available in all states) for a significant additional fee. However, this gives you complete flexibility in cancelling your travel plans. Note that if you invoke this rider, you only get 75% of your money back and you must cancel 24 hours before your set to depart.

A recent addition to this plan, is that you can upgrade the trip delay benefit from $2000 to $4000 or $6000 per person. This allows a more generous daily coverage of your accommodation ($150, $300, and $450 per person per day) which may be more in line with your expected accommodations. The Safe Travels Voyager plan offers coverage of up to $250,000 for medical expenses (exceeding requirements for Costa Rica) with no deductible.

For non-US residents, you can purchase the Safe Travels International plan. These two plans are travel insurance only and they do not offer coverage to insure the value of your trip. However, in addition to the maximum of the policy that you purchase, each policy will have a $2000 trip delay benefit which can be used for quarantine due to COVID-19 (works out to about $150 per person per day of quarantine). For Costa Rica, you need only purchase the minimum $50,000 medical maximum to meet their requirements, but you can choose to exceed these requirements if you so choose.