The Ultimate Beauty Insurance Comparison Guide

You asked for it, and Beauty Insurance Plus delivered. We’ve compiled everything today’s beauty pros need to know when comparing different beauty insurance plans online. With the health climate today, professionals need to be more mindful than ever what their insurance covers in order to practice the art of beauty with confidence.

Read on as we cover everything to look for in today’s top beauty insurance programs.

Comparing Online Beauty Insurance Programs

There are literally dozens of different beauty insurance programs out there. Just Googling beauty insurance reviews brings up page after page of results. Short of going from one page to the next and then back and forth to compare different features, what’s the best way to do a pro-level beauty insurance comparison?

The best place to start in a beauty insurance comparison is with the company itself. A lot of larger insurance carriers like Progressive Commercial are starting to enter the beauty insurance space and it can add to the clutter. The biggest differentiator for many pros is price, but we’ll show where selecting a plan by price alone can actually cost you more in the long run.

To narrow down your search, start looking at the companies behind the policy to see if you should move forward. A beauty insurance company needs to have keen expertise in the business of beauty in order to engineer a program that adequately covers everything you need from your program.

Some costs are harder to imagine than others and it takes a company living and breathing the beauty business in order to provide the kind of coverage today’s pros need to survive and thrive.

Beauty Insurance Plus has designed our program just for beauty professionals and it’s all we do. The longer you focus on one single thing, the better you tend to become. This is definitely one of the reasons we feel that we’re consistently ranked as “Excellent” by hundreds of our beauty professional policyholders.

Ranking Policies Based on Coverage Amounts

A key aspect to any beauty insurance policy has to be what it does and does not cover. A beauty insurance plan that just goes for the “bare minimum” is likely to leave a beauty pro paying out-of-pocket when an unexpected event comes along. That’s why it’s so crucial to check out the coverage types and amounts of different insurance plans.

Key areas of coverage any beauty insurance plan worth its weight will have include:

General Liability - general liability is usually the very first coverage area listed and is something every insurance company offers. This coverage is for any third-party claims of injury or damage to property that occur on or around your place of business. General liability coverage is often called “slip and fall insurance” since these are the notorious types of claims that happen to business owners. With BIP, you get $2 million per occurrence and $3 million per year.
Professional Liability - professional liability covers professionals for claims for injury or damage to property that result from the actual services performed on clients. In the beauty industry, cosmetologists, estheticians, make up artists, and other beauty professionals are all performing up close and personal services in order to obtain a desired look. Throw in sharp instruments, hot elements, and chemicals, and it’s easy to imagine any one of a number of different accidents that can and do occur within beauty salons each and every day. After an accident occurs is definitely not the time to be thinking about insurance coverage. That’s why all BIP policies come with $2 million per occurrence and $3 million per year for claims related to professional liability.
Identity Theft Protection Coverage - the last coverage area we’ll hit is so crucial for today’s digital environment. With BIP, our members enjoy peace of mind online through a $25,000 identity protection plan. If your identity is stolen, you have an entire team of identity restoration specialists ready to assist in putting the pieces back together. This vital coverage is rarely included with most other beauty insurance plans out there leaving you holding the bill should your identity be compromised.

Who Has the Best Benefits for Beauty Insurance?

Let’s face it, insurance is a financial protection plan that helps you stay prepared should an unfortunate event give rise to a claim at some point in your career. However, what happens if you’re lucky and never have a claim? That’s where we decided to pour on the value for our members with an extremely robust membership benefits plan. Some insurance companies tend to shy away from marketing their benefits perhaps because they are a bit lacking.

Running through websites for the top competitors in beauty insurance today, this is what we were able to find in regards to benefits plans:

Hiscox: no benefits listed.
Insure BodyWork: no benefits listed.
Associated Hair Professionals / Associated Skincare Professionals: bi-monthly magazine, access to webinars, discounts, and a free website.
Alternative Balance: access to ebooks, discounts, and online form templates.
Progressive Commercial: no benefits listed.
Beauty Insurance Plus: business e-tools, access to a library of ebooks, free beauty subscription, free professional website, product and service discounts, access to BIP marketplace, and more.

Other areas we didn’t count as “benefits” but definitely provide a benefit to members include things like portability, occurrence form coverage, and coverage for more than 500 different beauty and wellness services. Each of these come standard with a BIP beauty insurance policy.

Finding the Best-Priced Beauty Insurance Plans

Finally, we come to the item usually at the top of every professional’s list - price. Price is a very important consideration when it comes to beauty insurance but we definitely caution against going with one company over another based on price alone. Always be sure to make sure the plans you’re comparing are apples-to-apples with what they actually provide in coverage and benefits in order to find the best value for the investment you’re making by obtaining insurance coverage.

With that being said, let’s run down the same top competitors we just used above as we compare beauty insurance programs based on price.

Hiscox insurance advertises their beauty insurance “starts at $22.50 per month”. Per year, that’s $270. However, Hiscox quotes professionals based on their location and the services they provide which can dramatically increase the rates.
Insure BodyWork lists their professional liability policy at $96 per year and a student liability policy at $67 per year. They do not list any part-time options. For covered modalities, they list a grand total of 12 different services.
Associated Hair Professionals / Associated Skincare Professionals (ASCP) has an advertised price of $259 per year. They do not list any options for part-time or students.
Alternative Balance provides a rate list detailing a price of $189 per year for students, $219 for part-time pros (defined as working less than 10 hours per week), and $249 per year for professionals.
Progressive Commercial requires professionals to undergo a formal quoting process in order to provide a rate. They do list factors that can affect their pricing which include type of services provided and coverage amounts.
Beauty Insurance Plus offers a one-year policy for $169 per year for all professionals and a two-year policy option for $140 per year ($279.95 total). BIP also offers a students-only plan for just $149 for a year of coverage.

A really big consideration to remember is that many of the plans out there charge additional fees for things like operating in certain states or providing particular services and others like annual membership dues. With BIP, we decided that straightforward rates were the easiest for our members so the rates we list are the final amount a member will ever pay.

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