DM Insurance

[tbrown]

I was wondering what all you DM's use for insurance. VB seems a little high, and was curious if someone else had another sugestion.

[tpscuba]

We use VB and you are right they are high. I plan on discussing this with them at DEMA at the end of the month. We run our DMs on our shop policy which it is a lesser rate, but they can not assist anyone else. If they do then they have to pick up their own Ins.
SSI has a good rate, but you need to compare policy there are things they don't cover.
The one thing we noticed is that SSI doesn't have boat ins. Being that our training is done from shore and when we do use a boat the boat has it's own ins. the difference from VB and SSI is $200.00. This is the area we want to talkto them about.

[fantasea]

Thrown,

SSI was considerably less than VB for this year's Ins. premiums. As far as we've been told it was because their contract extended past a period that VB had (ass VB had to renegotiate a new contract this year). Next year, the SSI contract expires, and they will need to renegotiate it's Ins. premiums and the cost is expected to rise considerably to meet what current market levels are at, if they wish to provide similiar levels of coverage.

Besides the events of last year effecting premiums as a whole, the insurance industry regarded the premiums as underpriced for many years. For good or bad, its now it is all catching-up. This is a very big issue and concern to most dive professionals and dive operators who pay an even larger premiums to cover their operations in addition to their individual instructor/divemaster coverage.

Seeing premiums go down is not likely to happen.