Why is wedding insurance important?
Why do I need wedding insurance you might ask? A good starting point is that the average cost of a UK wedding in 2019 was approximately £17,000, a figure roughly equal to the cost of a nice car. If you have a wedding budget of around £5000, for sure you will overspend. The average excess is 20%, which would make your outlay grow to £6000 – the cost of a small lean-to conservatory for your house.
Norfolk Wedding Photography
Basically, you are about to spend a serious amount of money on what will be one of the most amazing days of your life and is likely to have been 2 years in the making. Many people commit large sums of money in advance on companies and products that they will not take advantage of between now and the wedding, but what if the unexpected happens?
Nobody has a crystal ball and the disruption the Covid-19 pandemic has caused is a great example of you having to plan and protect yourself from the unknown. Imagine if you had planned your wedding, paid all those deposits and possibly paid some suppliers in full, only to be hit with the prospect of having to re-plan your entire wedding due to Covid-19.
On top of the immediate disruption Covid-19 has caused, we don’t currently know how long the pandemic will last and how it will impact businesses in the future. With respect to the travel and tourism industry, to which the wedding industry has close links, Gloria Guevara, president/CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council has stated that the global travel and tourism industry is in a fight for survival with an estimated 50 million jobs globally at risk due to the pandemic.
We cannot predict the future but we can financially protect ourselves with good quality wedding insurance.
Wedding insurance is there to protect your day, and covers you from suppliers going into administration, to illness, to the wedding cake being eaten by a squirrel, (yes, that actually happened!)
Would wedding insurance have protected you from Covid-19?
This is what has been reported on moneysavingexpert.com
John Lewis has now confirmed that its wedding insurance customers will be covered for cancellation if their wedding venue can’t hold the wedding due to Government restrictions. So there should be cover for weddings scheduled at least until early May (subject to the policyholder minimising their costs, for example checking if any elements of the wedding are refundable) – and possibly further ahead if the restrictions are extended.
Debenhams and Wedding Plan Insurance say that weddings scheduled for before 30 June 2020 will be covered for cancellation if the wedding or reception venue is closed by the council due to Government restrictions.
For weddings further ahead, whether you’d be covered would depend on the circumstances (assuming the blanket wedding ban was lifted but coronavirus continued to cause some disruption). Check with your insurer directly, but as a general rule you’re likely to be covered if the venue cancels due to coronavirus, or if a member of the wedding party or close relative falls ill with coronavirus – but not if they’re simply self-isolating, or if guests can’t attend due to travel restrictions.
In all cases, you should contact your insurer before making any decisions or cancellations – and stay in touch with any wedding suppliers to see what they can offer you.
It’s also worth noting that several leading providers, including the three above, have already stopped selling wedding insurance due to coronavirus. So unfortunately, if you’ve not yet bought cover for your wedding. you’re unlikely to be able to now.
If you find your wedding insurance doesn’t cover you – or you haven’t yet bought wedding insurance and are now unable to – the first thing to do is to check whether any of the elements of the wedding are refundable.
Sadly, if you’re not covered by insurance and you won’t get a refund if you cancel, you may have to make some tough decisions – depending on how far ahead your wedding is and how much money you’ve already paid towards it.
Should I buy wedding insurance?
I have a bride who originally planned on getting married in 2019, but due to issues with a destination wedding abroad, it was postponed to 2020, and now due to Covid-19 it has been postponed for a third time to 2021. It’s an extreme case but when things go wrong it is always nice to know that you won’t be out of pocket. The last thing you want is a financial worry along that wonderful journey to your wedding day.
At the time of writing this blog, it is not currently possible to purchase wedding insurance, but once the Insurance companies start insuring again, we totally recommend taking out wedding insurance. In fact, for several years we have been offering wedding insurance with our platinum package because we know how important it is to have protection. We have seen too many operators go into administration, taking large amounts of clients money with them.
If you would like to learn more about the services these Norwich based wedding photographers offer then do get in contact with us. We offer more than just a wedding photography service to our clients because, put quite simply, we care.
View our Wedding Photography Packages