The long-awaited vacation has finally arrived, the hotel is settled, and the beach chair is found – but it’s raining. Especially for families with children, bad weather during vacation is a major annoyance that quickly dampens the holiday spirit. Therefore, bad weather is also one of the main concerns even before departure.
Now, the Hamburg-based startup Wetterheld has come up with a smart solution: With travel rain insurance, vacationers receive an automatic payment of 50 to 300 euros per rainy vacation day. In 2020, Wetterheld already disrupted two conservative industries, agriculture and insurance, with its digital drought insurance for farmers and has since been closely observed by the industry.
“We have always wanted to introduce rain insurance for vacation trips, but initially, we focused on larger customers in the agricultural sector. Meanwhile, a powerful digital insurance platform has been developed, which we are now making accessible to private customers for their vacations,” said Nikolaus Haufler, co-founder, and CEO.
To calculate the insurance premium, Wetterheld’s servers perform a real-time analysis of weather data at the vacation destination to calculate the rain risk as accurately as possible. The result is an individual offer with prices starting from €3 per day. Even destinations with frequent rainfall can be insured by automatically offering a contract with a deductible, which means the payout does not start from the first but, for example, from the second rainy vacation day.
Wetterheld offers this solution on its website at wetterheld.com and also collaborates with partners in the travel industry. One of the partners is the largest platform for beach chair bookings, Strandbutler.
Strandbutler is the largest platform for beach chair rentals in Germany, allowing guests to book beach chairs at over 90 beach chair rental locations from Borkum to Usedom. In addition, guests in several regions can already conveniently order and pay for food and drinks from selected restaurant partners while sitting in their beach chairs or holiday apartments.
“We believe that good weather is part of a beach vacation, and we offer the Wetterheld insurance to all our guests up to 15 days before arrival,” said Jens Bliesener, CEO of Strandbutler.
“We are delighted to offer all beach chair renters a virtually weather-independent holiday guarantee with the rain – or rather, good weather – insurance on our booking platform www.strandbutler.de,” added Bernhard Sourdeau, co-founder of Strandbutler.
Wetterheld is supported by European insurer Wakam, which specializes in digital insurance models and ensures payouts even when, proverbially, “the vacation falls into the water.”
