If you’re tempted to start up your own courier service, you only want to be paying out for the absolute must haves at the outset to enable legally driving on the road and being covered for your business needs. You may be tempted to tick all of the boxes on the online comparison van insurance form just to be sure, not really knowing what they’re covering.
Generally, the rule of thumb for insuring products transported in your van goes along the lines of: if you’re a tradesman, it’s goods in transit cover you need. If you’re a courier and will only ever be carrying other peoples goods, then it’s definitely the courier package for you. Although, yes, both van insurance policies do cover the goods in your van.
Goods in transit covers a limited amount of articles, all of which are owned by the policy holder of the base van insurance and the additional goods in transit ancillary. The amount you insure for will have a direct affect on your premium.
If you are a specialist stone-cutter, for example, and your tools are imported from Italy, you will pay more than a chippy whose range can possibly be replaced in one fell swoop from Toolstation. However, the latter’s tool collection is probably seen as a more desirable package for the opportunist thief, so don’t expect a necessarily cheap package on top of your base van insurance policy. There are more van insurance claims than ever going in for theft, which the police are suggesting is down to unemployment and a lack of job prospects forcing more people to be tempted by an unlocked van than would normally be the case.
Courier insurance, however, is an additional (ancillary) policy to your base van insurance document which insures you for other peoples goods, whereby you’re acting as the transport facility for getting product a to customer b and you have no financial gain from the product which you are transporting. You charge for the courier service that you are providing and nothing more.
And the last little fly in the ointment is Bonding. This is an insurance that covers the courier owner should any of their employees resort to theft whilst they are representing the courier company. For example, if you, the courier, won a contract for delivering Olympic torches but had to employ other drivers or subcontract some of the work, should any of the drivers under your employ see fit to stash a torch or two before they got to where they were supposed to, you wouldn’t see your business go up in flames, rather, you’d be covered financially to replace the missing torches, irrespective of any criminal charges brought against the employee.
All three are ancillaries to a basic cheap van insurance policy and all, in one way or another, cover goods in transit. It’s easy to see where the confusion arises, but hopefully this article has brought some clarity to the issue, at least at the most base level. If you need to check what each one means in real terms as you search for the base cheap van insurance quote, check it out here using our online form.