Planning a Conference? You Need Event Insurance

With the world opening back up, millions are booking work travel and planning events for the first time in over a year. Many conferences seem pressed to go bigger and better than the next, but scaling up presents risks. Today, even before you open registration, it’s important to secure event planning insurance and ensure you’re covered for a wild new world of threats and risks.

Finding the right conference insurance means considering these risks. They could include cyber security threats, health emergencies, unreliable partners, and court fees or payouts if you are sued. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that change may arrive at any second — and in any form — so it’s important to plan accordingly.

Luckily, by securing the right insurance coverage ahead of time, you can rest assured that you’ll be covered across all foreseeable crises and maintain your focus on throwing the most successful event possible. So read on to learn what you need to know about event planning insurance to ensure your conference goes off without a hitch.

How to Identify the Risks Involved

Whether you’re planning a global conference or researching event planning for the first time, there are a number of risks you’ll need to prepare for. The pandemic aside, something as simple as a missing vendor, faulty AC system, debris in the parking lot, or piece of spam-mail can flip your entire event on its head.

As you’re planning, list out every team and venue you plan to work with. Map out the size of each event within the conference. Go over the technology, equipment, and staff needed with your clients to perform a risk assessment and rate each event based on the level of risk that could incur. Event planning site Cvent suggests evaluating these risks based on the attendee impact, business impact, and internal impact to assess the total risk involved. It also rates regulatory, financial, contractual, and safety and security risks as the most critical risks to plan around — and ensure you’re insured for.

Risks Defined

As mentioned, the following categories encompass the greatest risks you’ll face, and you’ll need to secure insurance coverage around each of them.

Regulatory Risks — Wherever you’re planning your conference you’ll need to review the related federal, state, and local laws. This means securing the right permits and providing proof of insurance when asked.

Financial Risks — Beyond sticking to your budget, it’s important to maintain strong accounting practices for documentation should you incur a loss for your client or receive faulty payment from a guest or vendor. You could be liable for negligence, and without proper conference insurance your business could be held accountable for tremendous financial claims.

Safety and Security — Here, a standard slip-and-fall could lead an attendee to file for your team to cover their medical bills, or a vendor to sue for unfit working conditions. Moreover, broad event cancellation could occur due to sudden illness, severe weather, or other factors outside of your control (such as a global pandemic), so it’s important to make sure you won’t be held solely accountable for refunding every ticket to your client.

Health and Environment — Many businesses and events are continuing COVID protocols for the health and safety of their guests. With the delta variant surging, some events may face potential cancellation depending on their location and other risks factors. Insurance products respond to the needs of today; we may soon see pandemic insurance become commonplace.

That said, for every risk, find a plan. What type of insurance do you need for each situation? Which additional coverage options will you add on to reduce your risk?

Professional Liability Insurance

When booking conference insurance, you must consider every vendor, client, and team you’ll need to work with. From there, you’ll also need to make sure you’re covered for any incident that occurs between yourself and these parties, which is where professional liability insurance comes into play.

Professional liability insurance is designed to guard your business against claims filed by your client because of your company’s failure to provide a promised service, or responsibility in any loss incurred by the client.

For example, if an unreliable vendor, entertainer, or caterer fails to show up you’ll be held responsible and may have to pay for refunded tickets or the cost incurred from unhappy guests. Planning for these crises is just another step in mapping your conference insurance plan, and a healthy step in building a proper safety net.

General Liability Insurance

For starters, you’ll want to secure general liability insurance. This type of policy covers your event for any bodily injury or property damage that occurs to a third party. You’ll be covered in any incident involving guests or vendors where you owe monetary compensation for medical bills or damage to property of others.

Cyber Liability Insurance

Today, millions are moving from virtual events to in-person conferences, but this doesn’t mean there aren’t still cyber threats to plan for. If you’re gathering your invites or tickets via email, one quick phishing scam could leave you responsible for a major breach in data. Many conferences now use electronic check-in systems, scannable badges and local wifi. These present potential cyber risks.

If your event falls victim to a hack or cyber breach you’ll have to pay to notify attendees, recover any lost data, and cover any lawsuit for privacy breaches. These tasks quickly add up, and so it’s imperative to secure cyber liability insurance as part of your larger conference insurance plan. A single cyber-attack is more costly than most businesses realize.

Next Steps

Don’t wait until it’s too late to start calculating the risks involved in your conference. At NOW Insurance we make insurance simple, fast and affordable for small businesses. It takes less than three minutes to receive a quote from our easy online application where we quickly calculate the total amount of coverage you’ll need and help you discover solutions to problems you may not have even thought of. Contact us with any questions you have about coverage.