Why Not Insure The Weather?
Weather insurance – doesn’t it sound strange? Well, in any case it represents one of the oldest forms of insurance. Since the beginning of agriculture, farmers’ everyday earning has depended on the weather. Nowadays, much more than crops can be covered by weather insurance.
Rain – that’s the usual target of weather insurance. Fortunately, rain insurance policies are easy to find. Regarding rain policies, you can pick rain accumulation policies (for this, you need to decide how much rain would still be acceptable for your event and how much would already waste it) or dry hours (how many hours in a period of time were without any rain). Analogically you can take counteraction on snow, aiming on the inches per session or per storm. Municipalities and public organs can go for a special version to cover extra costs – snow removal insurance.
And the whole insurance business goes even further. There is wind insurance against bad wind conditions, great for example for a hot air ballooning show. An ice cream promotion can buy temperature insurance to secure the investment in the face of bad weather.
Most insurance companies allow you to combine these policies for any event. Are you rolling a movie and need to insure underwater visibility or against lack of snow? No problem, film productions are typical customers for many unusual insurance policies. Managers of sports events, concerts, festivals or trade shows are also typical clients of weather insurance. But also other people, who don’t earn money depending on weather, like me, selling life insurance, but who are enjoying some spare time activities or going for holidays, can go for such insurance.
This is quite a new product, just getting to the customers from the whole world. When you go on holiday and the weather is much worse than expected, certain French travel agencies (in cooperation with Aon France) are offering partial money reimbursement. Analogically, a new sunshine insurance is now available by Lufthansa, the German airlines. A simple insurance policy is offered for €20 ($31.24) for passengers from Germany. They can get €20 back for each day during their holiday when it rains more than 5mm.
Naturally, weather insurance is probably not needed when you are travelling to Tunisia or Greece. However, when going to Vancouver, weather insurance might not be available. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.
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