Why Bother With Wedding Insurance?
Published: 14 February 2011
By MoneyHighStreet Staff 3 Comments
Updated: 12 April 2012
It’s Valentines Day and if you’re in love and about to get engaged today, the last thing on your mind is going to be insurance, but as Defaqto advise it is important to have wedding insurance in place from the moment you start committing money.
With the wedding season fast approaching and today, Valentines Day, providing the ideal opportunity for some to start on their wedding journey, perhaps with a sapphire engagement ring, it seems insurance does need to feature amongst the otherwise more romantic thoughts.
As Mike Powell, Defaqto’s Insight Analyst for General Insurance, said: “We all know that weddings are expensive and there are many elements that involve cost early on, such as placing a deposit on a venue.
Therefore, when planning the big day it is essential that people focus on purchasing appropriate insurance as soon as they commit money.
Everyone’s situations and plans are different so it is essential that consumers match the features and benefits they need from their wedding insurance with those provided by the policy they choose.”
According to Defaqto research, there is a huge amount of difference between different wedding insurance policies.
For example only 23% will pay the full costs of rearranging the wedding and only 20% provide cover for the failure of wedding suppliers, such as caterers, to provide what has been paid for.
As you look for a policy it is important to make sure you do get the cover you need and whilst price has an important role to play it’s not the only criteria to use when choosing.
Think about such as the level of cancellation costs covered, what level is cover is provided shoud the wedding have to be cancelled because one or both of the couple are made redundant or what about if the wedding venue goes into administration and the booking is cancelled?
Defaqto’s Star Ratings for wedding insurance aim to help people understand the overall level of features and benefits different policies offer.
With the current economic climate the way it is, wedding insurance has become more important than ever before. The global recession has resulted in many companies going out of business (both large and small) and many couples are turning to wedding insurance to provide both peace of mind and financial protection for what’s likely to be the third biggest purchase they’ll ever make!
There is a slight flaw in using Defaqto’s scores for wedding insurance. The reason for this is that Dreamsaver’s Gold policy (with £10,000 cancellation cover) is rated as 3 star and the Platinum and Diamond have higher star ratings.
The issue is that if you had a £10,000 wedding you would not gain anything from purchasing a higher rated product, because you would only get back the £10,000 you spent on your wedding if it needed to be cancelled. Indeed you would probably be wasting your money if you did.
Wedding insurance cover is priced generally on the cancellation limit and most people select the appropriate policy to cover their wedding based on this.
Other criteria to take into account is the level of rearrangement cover many companies only of 50% cover, while Dreamsaver offers 75%.
As with all insurance products we would recommend that your read the policy wording before you purchase the policy
That’s a very interesting point made about the Defaqto ratings.