By Scott Chambers
Media outlets throughout the world are reporting on a pricy annual premium that Wimbledon added to its commercial insurance policy every year for the last 17 years. Apparently, Wimbledon paid upwards of $2,000,000 per year for pandemic insurance, something that most would have, prior to March 2020, viewed as an extremely remote likelihood of actually being needed. However, the cancellation of this year’s Wimbledon event scheduled for June 29, – July 12, 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a claim under the commercial insurance policy to recover approximately $141 Million in lost revenues. The rider on the Wimbledon policy cost approximately $34 million over the last 17 years.
While not all commercial insurance policies have a pandemic loss rider in its standard terms, many policies may, particularly as this would have been normally seen as an extremely rare, even unlikely, event requiring coverage for.
Other polices may have pandemic or other business interruption insurance coverage that would apply to lost revenues from a COVID-19 related issue or other downturn in the economy that are only secondarily related to the pandemic.
While Wimbledon’s pandemic insurance was a separate rider to their main commercial insurance policy, not all organizations would have had the forethought to purchase such additional coverage and many other organizations may have such coverage and not even know it.
All businesses would be well advised to undertake comprehensive reviews their commercial insurance policies and riders to see if there are potential areas of coverage for pandemic related revenue losses and if they should make a claim.
The lawyers at Doak Shirreff Lawyers LLP are available to assist businesses in a substantive review of their commercial insurance policies to determine if such coverage is available. Or if your business has this type of coverage but the insurer is denying your claim, Doak Shirreff may be able to help.
Contact Doak Shirreff at [email protected] or call 250-763-4323 or 1-800-661-4359.