Holiday home insurance

No, we only cover holiday home within the United Kingdom.

We cover holiday homes built of standard construction, so built of brick, stone or concrete and roofed with slate, tiles or concrete. We currently do not cover static or mobile caravans.

Whether to family, friends or paying guests as the property owner you have a number of legal responsibilities and duties to ensure that the property is safe so our holiday home policy comes with £2M Public Liability insurance as standard. This limit can be increased subject to an additional premium.

Public liability covers the sums you are legally liable to pay for compensation and claimants costs and expenses following accidental bodily injury to a third party or accidental damage to third party property arising from your activity as a holiday home business.

Cover is based on you being negligent and does not cover intentional actions.

No there are no minimum security conditions such as having 5 lever mortice locks rather than a 3 lever mortice lock on the policy.

If you have selected the optional cover of Accidental Damage, we do cover damage by pets but there is a general policy exclusion of damage caused by ‘scratching'. Accidental damage caused by the pet as a one off incident such as chewing, tearing or if the pet were unwell so vomited or fouling would be covered. It doesn't cover incidents where the pet has repeatedly caused damage as this is not a one off accident.

If you create an inventory of the items in your holiday home you can allocate a cost to replace them as new to get a total of how much you should insure for. This may take a little time to begin with but will be easy to update and manage going forward. Remember to keep the sum insured up to date when you buy new items or upgrade items in your holiday home. Keeping receipts and photos is also a good discipline and helps support any claims that you submit.

You could use a contents calculator as a helpful tool as there is one on directline.com used for our Home customers see the link below. Please be aware that this is for people's main residences and not holiday homes, so do not include items that are not covered such as valuables. Please be aware the bullet points about limits and cover relate to the Direct Line Home policy and not the holiday home insurance policy.

If you select our Buildings cover, you'll automatically get Equipment Breakdown cover. This pays to repair or replace your boiler, irrespective of its age, if it breaks down, but excludes wear and tear. Read more about our boiler insurance cover.

To make a claim, you need to arrange for a boiler engineer to visit your property and assess the boiler. They need to submit their report to us, so we can assess whether the claim is covered. If it is, we'll reimburse you for the repair/replacement costs, including parts, labour and call out charges, less the £200 excess.

This cover is not a maintenance contract – it doesn't cover servicing or Gas Safety Certificates (CP12).

The rebuild cost is the total cost of the work needed to completely rebuild your property including professional fees and debris removal costs and put it back to the condition it was in before if it was destroyed beyond repair. It's not the same as the market or resale value of the property.

Options available are that you use an online rebuild cost calculator. You can get a quote on our online journey using data from the Building Cost Information Service (BCIS) provided by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. It can't provide rebuild costs for all properties (such as flats, so the calculator button might not appear, or you might not see any values when you click on the button) but where values are provided would give you an indication of the range of the cost taking into account if the property is of a basic or excellent standard.

You can also instruct a local Chartered Surveyor to undertake a report on the property and provide you with an accurate rebuild figure.

It is your responsibility to ensure that the sum insured selected is adequate as if under insured this could affect the amount of any claim we may pay.

The property must be used solely as a Holiday home and not used for business use and we don't cover Holiday Homes where any form of non-motorised or motorised cycle or vehicle is provided (e.g. pedal cycles, scooters, Segway's, quad bikes, motorcycles or cars).