Where are you going to be traveling to this summer? Some people are hesitant about staying in a hotel, for fear of coming in contact with bedbugs. Hotels across the country spend thousands on trying to remove these pests. Finally, a company has created bedbug insurance, to help with those costs.
Bedbugs are nasty little creatures. They can get into your suitcases when you spend the night at a hotel, and end up coming home with you. Once this happens, it can be very difficult to get rid of bedbugs. A person must be extremely tenacious in order to finally end the infestation.
Hotels spend thousands of dollars in every attempt to treat their guest rooms for bedbugs. It was something that was seen as an unplanned expense, that the hotel landlords would have to pay for out of pocket. This meant that they were paying for the cost of treatment, or extermination of the bedbugs, as well as for the costs of replacing bedding and furniture that had become too infested to clean. These kinds of costs typically are excluded from coverage by insurance plans.
Some hotel property managers resort to hiring extermination companies to come to their hotels and conduct monthly preventative visits. Depending on the size of the hotel, and how badly the bedbugs have gotten into it, the cost of this can range from anywhere between $100.00 to several thousand dollars, each and every month. Again, this is something that hotels pay for out of pocket.
There is a type of insurance that will include “loss of attraction coverage”. These kinds of policies cover financial losses that hotels face when rooms have to be taken out of service because those rooms require extensive treatments for bedbugs. Until recently, this was the only insurance protection that hotels could get to help cover the costs of removing these pests.
Now, however, there is something new. A company called Aon Risk Solutions, which is part of the Aon Corp. insurance broker, has joined with Global Excess Partners, which is a commercial property insurance company that is based in Manhattan. A study done by Terminix that focused on problems with bedbugs ranked New York city as the “most infested”. It makes sense that one of the two insurance companies is located in New York, since it would be easy for New York hotels to connect with a local insurer.
The team made up by the two insurance companies have combined with Terminix, which is the largest pest-control company in the United States. Together, the three have created a bedbug specific insurance policy for hotels, landlords, and corporations. This is the first time that an insurance policy has been created for this purpose. This could make it a lot easier for hotels to properly treat their rooms for bedbugs, and that will make it much safer for your family to spend the night there.
Image by Eric Savage on Flickr