Wedding insurance has been around for quite awhile now, but it is becoming extremely more important in today’s wedding market.  For the most part, purchasing wedding insurance is a personal decision between you and your fiance.  With the trends of weddings being held in non-traditional locations we have seen some establishments require couples to purchase wedding insurance in order to obtain the rental of their location.  Museums especially want the assurance that if anything were to be damaged or missing, that you have a policy that will cover the loss.  But wedding insurance is so much more than liability if you want it to be, and in today’s economical crunch, it really does pay to have that peace of mind.

Wedding insurance can cover everything from liability at the venue, vendor cancellation, the loss of your wedding rings, weather cancellation (extreme weather), vendor deposits, vendor payments, military emergencies, wedding gown damage or loss, ruined photos, damaged gifts, sudden illness and more.

The best planned wedding can have mishaps.  I was recently hired by a couple who had everything planned, all vendors booked and ready to go!  Then their wedding planner backed out on them, the caterer wasn’t returning calls, and the room stager wouldn’t respond to any of their attempts to contact them.  I quickly came in and put the fires out.  What made it even easier to put the fires out was their Wedding Insurance.  The first wedding planner they hired had seemed to drop off the face of the earth and wouldn’t return deposits.  This made an already tight budget difficult to come up with new deposits.  The wedding insurance sent a check to the couple in the amount of the deposit within a week and we were back on track.  And when the room stager overbooked herself, we were easily able to get the wedding insurance to retrieve the total amount paid to her.

In today’s economical hardship, you never know when something will happen.  As a wedding planner, I have professional vendors that I work with in every aspect you can imagine for the wedding industry.  Within the last 6 months, 4 of them have had to shut their doors.  One of the vendors, which we had worked with for years, shut down 1 week prior to a wedding we had scheduled (and paid in full) with him.  We were able to pull resources and fix the situation, but it then took me months following the wedding to get reimbursed for the bill we had paid.

Wedding insurance gives you the security of these types of situations.  In my professional opinion, the average price of $150 – $500 is worth the peace of mind that you receive.  So much so, that we are looking into providing it as a gift to each of our clients.  It goes beyond the security of a wedding planner.  Even the best of us can’t predict when a long time professional will run into trouble.

Here are a few websites to check out:  

Travelers Wedding Insurance – https://www.protectmywedding.com/home.html

National Alliance of Special Event Planners – http://www.nasep.org/wedding-insurance.jsp

WedSafe – http://www.wedsafe.com/

Good Luck,

Andrea