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Sunshine insurance covers you on rainy travel days
Any tour operator will tell you that one of the biggest recurring questions asked on a group trip is "what will the weather be like today?" Nobody hopes for thunderstorms to block their once-in-a-lifetime view of the Amalfi Coast or cancel their bungee-jumping plans in New Zealand, after all. So, it's not a huge surprise that someone is finally addressing the 'problem'...short of controlling the weather itself.
Aon France has teamed with two French travel agencies--Pierre et Vacances and FranceLoc--to launch insurance against bad weather.
With this insurance, travelers who have had rain on four or more days in a single week of their trip are eligible for reimbursements up to 400 Euros (US$556). Aon France will determine exactly how much the traveler should be reimbursed based on satellite photos of the traveler's locale. (Although that seems a little subjective, right? Does four days of drizzle cancel river rafting any less than four days of heavy downpour?) The travelers will get a message via phone text or email with news about whether they're to be reimbursed.
With the oddities in weather recently from global warming, I wonder whether a string of rainy weeks could put this company out of business. But they figure--based on a trial run last year--that about 10% of those interested in the insurance would get reimbursed because of rainfall.
