Sunshine insurance covers you on rainy travel days

Any tour operator will tell you that one of the biggest recurring questions asked on a group trip is “what will the weather be like today?”

Nobody hopes for thunderstorms to block their once-in-a-lifetime view of the Amalfi Coast or cancel their bungee-jumping plans in New Zealand, after all. So, it’s not a huge surprise that someone is finally addressing the ‘problem’…short of controlling the weather itself.

Aon France has teamed with two French travel agencies–Pierre et Vacances and FranceLoc–to launch insurance against bad weather.

With this insurance, travelers who have had rain on four or more days in a single week of their trip are eligible for reimbursements up to 400 Euros (US$556). Aon France will determine exactly how much the traveler should be reimbursed based on satellite photos of the traveler’s locale. (Although that seems a little subjective, right? Does four days of drizzle cancel river rafting any less than four days of heavy downpour?) The travelers will get a message via phone text or email with news about whether they’re to be reimbursed.

With the oddities in weather recently from global warming, I wonder whether a string of rainy weeks could put this company out of business. But they figure–based on a trial run last year–that about 10% of those interested in the insurance would get reimbursed because of rainfall.