Amwins and Floodbase Unveil First-of-its-Kind Flood Insurance for U.S. Golf Courses

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (Aug. 13, 2024) – Today, Amwins, a leading distributor of specialty insurance products and services, announced the launch of their “Tees-to-Green” flood insurance program powered by Floodbase and backed by “A” rated carriers designed to reimburse U.S. golf courses for lost revenue and repair costs incurred when courses are flooded. 

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The first of its kind program fills a significant gap in flood coverage available to courses or golfing events. Golf courses are often built on land prone to flooding. Yet, resorts and courses generally only carry flood insurance for physical assets like golf carts, club houses, maintenance sheds, and equipment. Damage to the course itself and business interruption due to downtime are almost always excluded from current options on the market, which dramatically increases the cost of flood-related closures.  If the course is unplayable for days, weeks, or even longer, lost revenue can include green fees and concessions, hotel reservations, restaurant patrons, and other forms of significant income. 

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"The golf industry has always been very vulnerable to flooding. As the risk of flooding grows, courses need more options,” says Alex Kaplan, Executive Vice President for Alternative Risk at Amwins. “By partnering with Floodbase, we unlock a tremendous opportunity by enabling products that pay out based on the magnitude of flooding. Amwins has a track record of introducing advanced parametric products that address uncovered risks, and we are excited to make Tees-to-Green available to select distribution partners before making it generally available.” 

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Amwins’ new and exclusive “Tees-to-Green” flood insurance coverage is possible because of satellite technology invented by Floodbase. 

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Floodbase, a leading AI flood company founded in collaboration with Google, fuses hydrologic modeling and decades of satellite imagery to monitor flooding and flood severity every hour across the U.S. Their flood monitoring technology, proven to outperform NOAA, maps all the flooding over a golf course going back several decades. The historical data is used to create a transparent policy price and initiates continuous course monitoring with policies paying out and providing a quick and automatic solution when course flooding exceeds a predefined magnitude. This innovative approach eliminates the traditional claims process, sublimits, and exclusions. This technology can also provide a custom flood impact score of any course.

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“Flooding is the most common and costly weather-related disaster in the U.S.”, said Bessie Schwarz, chief executive officer at Floodbase. “The ‘Tees-to-Green’ program addresses a critical pain point for golf course operators, saving flood-impacted courses significant money and speeding recovery. Importantly, it demonstrates the private sector's ability to alleviate public sector recovery costs amid increasing billion-dollar disasters.”

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To inquire about purchasing Amwins’ “Tees-to-Green” coverage for your golf course or clients, or to receive a custom risk assessment of your course, please reach out to Amwins’ Executive Vice President of Alternative Risk, Alex Kaplan. To learn more about Amwins’ parametric capabilities, visit amwins.com/parametric.

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About Amwins

Amwins is the largest independent wholesale distributor of specialty insurance products in the U.S. dedicated to serving retail insurance agents by providing property and casualty products, specialty group benefit products, and administrative services. Based in Charlotte, N.C., the company operates through more than 155 offices globally and handles premium placements in excess of $33 billion annually. For more information, visit amwins.com. 

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About Floodbase

Floodbase is an end-to-end platform for parametric flood insurance. Built on nearly a decade of groundbreaking science, our solution continuously monitors flooding worldwide. Top re/insurers use Floodbase to cover large corporate and public sector clients against previously uninsurable economic loss from flooding. Floodbase is also used by FEMA, USAID, the UN, The New York Times and others to identify and more rapidly respond to floods.