In the late 1990s, some insurers began offering accidental all-risk cover as an optional guarantee within multi-risk home insurance.
Today, most insurers allow this guarantee to be arranged optionally. Some offer it within the same home insurance product as an additional cover, while others include it in “high-end” home insurance products.
Not all companies use the same name for this cover. Some call it “all risk”, others “accidental all risk”, “accidental damage all risk”, and so on.
Is It Worth Including Accidental All-Risk Cover in Your Home Insurance?
We cannot answer this question categorically, because that would mean knowing what will happen in the future. But we can offer a few points to help with the decision.
In principle, we need to know which events or accidents would be included. Insurers define this cover differently in their general conditions, but to specify what the guarantee includes, they often state that everything is included except what is excluded.
Therefore, we must carefully read what the general conditions indicate as excluded from this guarantee. Particular attention should be paid to whether the exclusions of other guarantees also apply to this cover.
Example of Accidental All-Risk Cover in Home Insurance
Let us take an example. If our glasses fall to the floor and break, we might initially think that, without going into the deductible, the insurer would cover the material damage caused by this accident, correct?
But if the exclusions for this guarantee state that the exclusions of the glass breakage guarantee also apply, we must check what those exclusions say. If the glass exclusions state that damage to lenses and frames is not included, the conclusion is that accidental all-risk cover will not cover accidental damage to the glasses.
It is also necessary to assess that these covers usually have a deductible, and each insurer sets a different amount: EUR 60, EUR 100, EUR 150 and so on.
There is another nuance: most insurers set a deductible, while others require the “accident-damaged” object to have a value above a certain amount. If it exceeds that amount, the full damage may be paid.
It is also important to know what increase this cover involves in the annual insurance premium. This allows us to weigh what it covers against what it costs.
Finally, the ideal would be to know whether there is a high probability of the covered events occurring. Since that is impossible, what can be assessed is whether we have objects whose value exceeds the deductible, whether we have children or pets that may cause accidents that could lead to a claim, and similar factors.
As an observation, during the years of economic boom in Spain, many policies included this guarantee, often without clients even knowing because the financial institution granting the mortgage arranged the policy that way. Today, however, the purchase of this type of home insurance policy has fallen sharply. The main reason is that price is now the most important variable when deciding which insurance to take out.