If you’re a regular reader of our blog you will know by now that our choice of winter destination this year is Morocco. With all of the faffing around getting Boris ready, our preparations for our trip had taken a back seat, however now he’s roadworthy again I’ve been busy trying to get everything in order for our trip.

Normally our winter travel is a straight forward process, we just ensure that we have  relevant insurance in place, pack our gear and off we go. This year though it’s needed a little more time for all the prep.

Home Insurance  I thought our home insurance would be straightforward.  Last year we’d opted to go with Saga as they would cover us for 4 months away for no extra charge, just a couple of conditions that we had to meet. I wrongly therefore presumed that I’d just need to inform them and away we would go again. When I called them though they informed me that to get me the best deal when I’d renewed they’d changed our policy to a different underwriter that would not cover long stays away. The obvious answer was to switch back to the policy we’d had with them previously, however I was informed that this wasn’t available to us either as they didn’t offer that option to new policy holders and that’s what we’d be classed as.  So I had no choice but to hit the phones and see whether we could get cover at a reasonable cost. After trying Swinton, Adrian Flux, NFU, Home Protect and the Camping and Caravan Club, all of which offer extended absence policies. I finally settled on the  Admiral Platinum Policy, mainly because they were over £120 cheaper than any of the others. Their conditions are similar to Saga’s, the heating has to be left on 12 degrees and the property needs to be checked once a week. We are lucky to have good neighbours who are happy to do this for us.

Motorhome Insurance  This has certainly proved both challenging and expensive. It seems that there are very few companies now that will cover Morocco. Of course we could take out 3rd party insurance at the border, but we really preferred fully comp cover if we could get it.

We managed to get fully comp quotes from 3 companies Comfort at £763 plus an additional £380 for Morocco, Saga £804 including Morocco and Advance Insurance Brokers (01373 822369) came up cover via Victor Milwell at £520 plus £237 for Morocco. We opted for the latter purely based on the price and as the policy is underwritten by Aviva felt it was a good option. This does include up to 9 months travel in Europe and European breakdown cover.  The downside is that to enable them to issue the green card we’ve had to provide dates for our arrival in Morocco which restricts our flexibility somewhat but we felt we could live with it. (Note, NFU and Herts Insurance both offer 3rd party cover, but they were more expensive than the fully comp cover we’ve opted for).

Travel Insurance  As with all our other insurances we have shopped around for this. Of course Morocco is not part of Europe, so not only did we need long stay insurance we also needed this to be worldwide cover to ensure we were covered in both Europe and Morocco. After doing a comparison on Medical travel compared and also pricing up with Saga and OK to travel, our best price still came from Alpha travel Insurance who we’ve used on our last couple of trips. We also had a seamless claim with them earlier in the year when we couldn’t go on our trip to Ireland which gives us confidence in them.

If you’d like to see what they can offer please click the link below https://alphatravelinsurance.mention-me.com/m/ol/ka6xp-andrea-riley

International Driving Permits  Obviously none of us know whether we are going to need IDP’s in Europe in the coming months, so as we are going to be away for a while we’ve had to cover the bases just in case. We needed two permits, one for Spain which is valid for 1 year and another one to cover us for France and Morocco which is valid for 3 years. These are simple enough to obtain, you just need a passport size photograph for each permit, you can then obtain them from a post office counter at a cost of £5.50 per person per permit.

Ferry After shopping around on various different route options, we decided to take the  Portsmouth to Santander ferry with Brittany ferries which we got a a good price. We set sail early on the 30th November so will land in Spain on 1st December.

A fortuitous phone around a few weeks ago means that Boris is moving to his new storage location tomorrow. As it’s a CASSOA gold location it reduced our insurance by £50. When we told our current location that we were moving though we found out that the site had been sold 2 months previously for development. We could have got back from our trip and had nowhere to park!

New adventures coming soon.

Andi