Generali drops home insurance after two claims in a year

Two claims in one year and Generali cancels your home insurance

Thirty-five years of a home policy, inherited from your parents, and two claims in twelve months. That was the entire record. No warning letter, no proposal to renegotiate the premium: the renewal simply never arrived. Is it normal for an insurer to leave you out in the cold without notice? More common than you'd think, and the contract allows it.

What the contract allows when you file two claims in a year

Home insurance is not an acquired right. It is a contract renewed each year, which the company can choose not to renew. That's the catch: they charge you for low risk and pull out when the customer actually starts using the product. Two claims are not catastrophic loss ratios. They are a leak and a broken window.

In almost any other industry, a customer of three and a half decades is considered an asset. Here, they become a liability. At renewal, with no advance notice and no written explanation, the policy disappears and the policyholder only finds out when they go looking for a direct debit that no longer exists.

It's not just Generali: non-renewals over home claims run across the sector

The pattern repeats at other brands. There are documented cases of policies cancelled for filing home claims at companies such as Verti, a Mapfre subsidiary, with the same script: using the insurance has consequences. It is argued that these policies were tightened after corporate moves such as the absorption of Liberty, which squeezed renewal conditions.

Those who know the business from the inside point to a single escape route: the mediation of a professional broker, able to fight for a renewal that the individual cannot defend alone. And those who look at it from a distance sum it up without embellishment: the behaviour is not unique to one brand, it is the industry standard. The advertising, of course, still antiestéticatures a familiar face on television.

The customer who pays without ever using the insurance

Here comes the truly baffling part. Policyholders who pay their home premium year after year without filing a single claim have even been looked down upon. The paradox is perfect: not using it makes you naive, and using it leaves you out in the cold. The system penalises in both directions, and meanwhile the fine print keeps getting signed.