What Insurance do Hotels Need?

What Insurance do Hotels Need?

Hotels, as businesses, are exposed to a wide range of risk. They’re a place where customers eat, sleep, and entertain themselves – and thus it’s likelier that something will go wrong, by sheer virtue of the number of hours that guests actually spend on the premises.

Fortunately, there are a range of insurance products which hoteliers might consider, including specialised insurance for hotels. Let’s assess a few of the options.

General Liability Insurance

General public liability insurance is designed to cover legal claims made by the public against your business. If a guest in your hotel walks into the lobby one morning and slips on a wet floor which hasn’t been adequately signposted, then your insurer would pay your costs, and any compensation due.

Commercial Property Insurance

Your premises also need to be protected against fire, vandalism and natural disaster. This is particularly important in a hotel, where the behaviour of your guests might raise or lower the level of risk. When deciding on a policy, you should have a figure in mind to cover a rebuild of the entire property, including any boundary walls and fittings. In some historic buildings, a re-build might be out of the question, but it’s still worth protecting yourself.

Employer’s Liability Insurance

Just as public liability insurance will protect you against members of the public, employer’s liability insurance will protect your employees. It’s a legal requirement that you have this kind of insurance as an employer; it’s there to cover staff who might injure themselves while working in your hotel. Injury doesn’t have to be sudden and dramatic, but it can take you off guard, and leave you short-staffed. It might therefore be worth taking out extra protection to cover the absence.

Other Types of Insurance

The specialised hotel insurance that we’ve mentioned brings together many of these disparate products into the same package – so that you can be reasonably sure you’re protected against every variety of risk.

It may also include things like business interruption cover, which will protect you in case you have to cease trading. There’s usually a specified period of cover to consider if the hotel should become uninhabitable – it should provide you time enough to recover from a disaster. This period, however, can be renegotiated, so make sure you have a fair idea of your recovery time, and leave yourself plenty of wriggle-room in case things don’t work out the way you’d hoped.

You might also cover yourself against more particular risks, like the loss of use of the hotel pool, or the loss of your alcohol licence. These events won’t prevent you from operating, but they will hamper your profitability, especially if they strike at an inopportune time of year.