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You insure your car, your house maybe even your life. Should you insure your drone?
If you do a Google search of “personal drone insurance” the results are pretty thin. Some are focused on protecting the drone from loss or damage due to a crash or a fly-off. Fewer results are actually related to harm your drone may accidentally cause to other people or property.
Anyone who has mishandled a drone landing (especially to your hands!) can attest to the value that drone insurance can provide. Companies like DJI Global actually offer DJI Care which allows for repair or replacement of your DJI drone under specific circumstances. It’s very specific coverage, even down to the region where it was damaged. So if you bought your drone in the United States DJI Care would cover(not including a replacement fee) damage in the United States & Canada, but not Europe. You would have to purchase separate DJI Care for that region.
So it seems easy enough to help offset at least part of the cost of a crash recovery. But what about those times when you actually cause harm to others or their property?
Anyone who has flown a drone likely knows first hand just how easy (and likely) it is for a failure of some sort to occur. Just do a google news search. It’s almost a daily event that a drone falls on someone or something.
Despite the fact that over 35 million drones of all shapes and sizes have been sold worldwide to date, property insurers have really only ventured into covering commercially used drones.
Of the millions of drones sold, the majority are likely to untrained and unskilled operators who are unfamiliar with the levels of regulation in place for their use. An enormous liability to any insurer. Even the notion of attaching a rider to one’s homeowner’s policy may be a long way off given the insurance industry’s reluctance to consider these risks given the extent of the how the risk has increased.
The best advice we can offer is to contact your current insurance representative, or the customer service dept of your home insurance policy. Chances are you are not the first person to call them with a question about drone insurance and your homeowners policy so expect an answer that is current. In some cases they may steer you to purchase an “Umbrella” policy that is inexpensive and may also provide other benefits to you as well.
If you could purchase “Drone Insurance” that would cover you for damage caused by your drone to people or property, how much would you be willing to pay per month for that coverage? Let us know in the comments.
