By Mitul Malkan, Product Manager for Commercial at ERS
The 2019 festival season is almost upon us, bringing much excitement to ERS Towers as we ready ourselves for the annual peak in Specialist Commercial Vehicle (SCV) underwriting. If your clients are looking for SCV insurance, we’ve got you covered.
It’s no surprise, the UK festival market is booming with 1000s hosted up and down the country offering a wide variety of line-ups and experiences – celebrating everything from the best music, to imaginative literature, the remarkable arts, or entertaining family events to the most appealing food festivals.
A staggering 3.9 million people attend UK music festivals alone – with many festival-goers returning to their favourite occasions year-in-year-out. All of which makes the festival scene a key revenue generator for thousands of traders, equipment providers and other specialist businesses.
Tying these disparate businesses together is their absolute reliance on vehicles for the duration of the season. A fireworks business will travel the length of the country to securely deliver product for a single minute-long blast. A modified catering van will rack up hundreds of miles travelling from site to site for a small handful of working days that will prove the most profitable of the entire year.
To support these businesses on the festival circuit we have a dedicated SCV UK Festival product. It’s the motor insurance equivalent of WOMAD, a deliberately diverse offering that covers seven vehicle categories in one, thus capturing every type of commercial vehicle required by our burgeoning festival industry.
Some of these vehicles carry high risk – those transporting gas canisters for example. Others may appear risky, when in fact they spend 99% of their time stationary and out of harm’s way. We make it our business to understand how these vehicles are really being used so that we can price the risk properly.
Here’s just a few examples of the SCV Festival categories we cover:
Catering: from speciality burger vans to mobile barista vehicles, festivals simply wouldn’t be the same without a wide array of food and drink options
Emergency and Rescue: every festival operator will require a significant first aid presence, usually comprising a number of private ambulances on-site
Non-registered: transforming an empty field into a festival arena is a massive undertaking, requiring cherry pickers, mobile cranes, forklift trucks and more besides
Special Types - Commercial: You’ll find modified vehicles a-plenty back stage, carrying everything from artists’ backdrops to the generators that power the entire festival and transporting specialist lighting rigs which are essential wherever there’s a main stage to be found
Marketing, Exhibition, Retail and Education: we insure a range of media vehicles who broadcast live from festival sites, many festivals are filmed, and a number even feature mobile cinemas as part of the entertainment
Specialist Loads: Pyrotechnics vehicles are in high demand over the festival season, fireworks celebrating opening ceremonies and headline acts
Many specialist commercial vehicle owners’ motor insurance policies are coming up for renewal right now, causing a headache for business owners to find cost-effective policies that genuinely cover these vehicles’ diverse use cases. To help make their lives easier, we’ve created a SCV online portal that provides insight into our entire specialist product range.
Sadly, we’ve heard many tales of insurers failing to pay out following festival-related calamities because the owner hasn’t declared their risk correctly, or because the policy was never right for such a bespoke need. This is why our SCV product exists. Working with our dedicated specialist Commercial team, our manual underwriting ensures we look at each quote individually. Making sure we can cater for the caterers, provide for the equipment providers, and offer the right cover for the thousands of commercial vehicles that are ignored by the mainstream market and yet are relied upon to deliver our country’s festival extravaganza each and every year.
Contact a member of the team today if you have an SCV opportunity commercialquotes@ers.com
