In many respects, holiday home insurance falls between the two stools of standard home insurance, on the one hand, and landlord insurance on the other:

• the property is owned by you and serves as a second or home away from home; but

• may also be let out to paying guests – as a regular money-earning venture or on those occasions when you have no intention of using the holiday home – and you become the landlord of short-term tenants.

Those particular characteristics of such a property are also reflected in the specialist holiday home insurance which needs to be arranged for the protection of the premises.

In short, there are several main components incorporated into holiday home insurance:

• the protection of the structure and fabric of the building itself, together with the contents you own, against such risks as fire, impacts (from vehicles and from falling objects), flooding, storm damage, theft and vandalism;

• indemnity against your liabilities as the property owner – and whenever the accommodation is let to tenants, your liabilities as a landlord – in the event that any visitor, tenant, neighbour, or member of the public is injured or has their property damaged and holds you negligent as the property owner or landlord; and

• because there may be times during the year when no one at all is living in your second home, an element of unoccupied property insurance that maintains the protection when your holiday home is at its most vulnerable – when there is no one living there.

Who owns a holiday home?

The statistics on holiday home ownership are somewhat imprecise – as a report by the BBC in 2015 suggested.

The report refers to some 1.5 million people who maintain a second address in England or wales, some 48,000 in Scotland and nearly 821,000 abroad. It seems that only 11% of these properties may be described as holiday homes, however.

But that still makes for an approximate holiday home ownership of well over a quarter of a million.

Here at GSI Insurance, we are able to provide holiday home insurance for all of those properties, whether in the UK or Europe.

If you are fortunate enough to own a holiday home, it is important that you arrange specialist holiday home insurance – which incorporates all the elements of cover you need – rather than rely on, say, standard home insurance for an owner occupier or landlord insurance for let property.

The use to which your property is put is an important material fact as far as any insurer is concerned, and unless you have cover specifically designed for your holiday home, you may find that any claim you make is rejected.