As a travel agent, you know the best spots to visit in almost any city. Your carefully curated recommendations delve much deeper than a quick Yelp or Google search could ever dream. You help your clients plan trips of a lifetime, whether they’re headed to a sunny beach or a ski extravaganza in the mountains. By taking care of the tricky logistics of planning a vacation, you help people embark stress free with all the necessary information in hand.
But as we all know, not every trip goes as planned. You haven’t checked every box without business insurance for travel agents, which can protect your agency against major financial loss.
Let’s take a closer look at three scenarios in which the right commercial insurance policies could save your travel agency.
The one time you forget to set out your yellow caution sign warning clients of a wet floor, someone enters your building and falls. It’s an unfortunate accident, but if a third party sustains an injury on your property, you may be responsible for their medical bills. The situation could even escalate to an expensive lawsuit, depending on the cause and extent of the injuries.
Before you assume it will never happen to you, think about how many people enter your office each day. General liability insurance is called “slip ‘n’ fall” coverage for a reason, but it also covers incidents like a client spilling your scalding complimentary coffee on themselves. To protect yourself against damages associated with bodily injury, sufficient general liability insurance is a must.
During a summer storm, lightning strikes a transmission cable and causes a blackout in your neighborhood. It seems like no big deal until you try to turn on your computers the next morning and discover the surge has fried your travel agency’s most important pieces of technology.
Every client appointment that you miss costs money, and lacking access to electronic records simply isn’t an option for a modern travel agency! How can you afford a lapse in business combined with the potential cost of replacing or restoring your computers?
Scenarios like these are made easier with property insurance, often bundled together with general liability insurance into one handy Business Owners Policy (BOP). As the Insurance Information Institute outlines, property insurance can cover the actual cash value or the replacement cost of your structures and contents due to covered events like electrical surges, fire, embezzlement, and more. Adding business interruption coverage can help your travel agency stay afloat in the interim by paying unavoidable costs that don’t stop just because your business is temporarily out of commission.
Since you work with clients’ personal information on your vulnerable electronic devices, your travel agency should also consider cyber insurance to help minimize damage if client records are ever compromised accidentally or intentionally.
Airline overbookings are a contentious topic right now. It just goes to show that even the best of us—including your travel agency—can’t predict what will go right and what will go wrong on a trip. What happens if an unhappy client holds your travel agency responsible for a mishap that occurs on their vacation?
Since your business is grounded in providing advice and services to clients, you need professional liability insurance (also called “errors and omissions”) to protect your company against litigation for what you can’t control. As the Wall Street Journal reports, in the case Tuohey v. Trans National Travel Inc., one traveler won $25,000 in damages after she arrived at her hotel and found it under construction and lacking electricity. Though you try to give your best advice to clients, liability insurance can help with court costs or damages if some aspect of a trip you planned doesn’t work out.
After learning more about business insurance for travel agents, are you ready to take a good look at your coverage? Compare quotes quickly with CoverHound today!
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